May 27, 2008 at 10:23AM
By Lexy Zissu
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I’m not a morning person. Never have been. My daughter is a terrible/odd sleeper but the upshot to her late nights is that she wakes up late (for a kid), too. If I had to do morning duty, her schedule makes it possible even for me. But I’m actually not "on" in the mornings as I tend to do most of my writing late at night or in the morning before her father goes to work. All of this preamble is getting to a story, I swear. I happened to wake up with her one morning over the long weekend so her father could have a much deserved sleep-in. I do like the opportunity to be in charge of her breakfast and we have fun things we make together just-us-two on these rare mornings. We especially like to make buckwheat pancakes that I load with all sorts of goodies (flaxseed oil, wheat germ, organic eggs, blueberries etc.) and make them even more special by dotting the resulting misshapen things with (the most miniscule amount of) maple syrup that comes from someone near our CSA farm.
Lately, the kid wakes up most mornings requesting yogurt before she even says good morning. This is what she asked me for. She has always been on the tiny side – weight and otherwise – for her age so long ago when we were a bit concerned about this, we gave her packaged baby yogurt. I went back and forth on the decision to do this for a while – I’m not someone who willingly gives the kid sugar and baby yogurts are oddly loaded with the stuff. But she wasn’t eating plain whole fat yogurt, even with organic fruit preserves stirred into it, so I gave in. I wanted her to have the extra calories and fat. Sadly these things are a bit addictive and we’ve never been able to wean her off of them. So I’ve accepted them in our life, especially as I'm not doing breakfast and don't have to witness her devouring them daily. I'm rarely an out-of-sight-out-of-mind mom, so this is a big concession.
So, on this morning, I gave her her yogurt, which she ate in 3 seconds flat. Then she requested another one. I declined, distracted her with some fresh-from-the-farmers-market (unsprayed!) strawberries and went into the kitchen to start the pancake process. I rinsed out the yogurt cup and absent-mindedly looked at the bottom of it before tossing it into the recycling bin.
To my shock and horror there was a number 6 on the bottom of it!!!!!!!!!! Aaaaaaack!
For those of you who don’t follow plastic numbers, 6 is polystyrene. Styrene is a possible endocrine distrupter/carcinogen. (For information about what each of those recycling code numbers means, see this decoder from The Daily Green.) It’s a plastic we tell readers to avoid entirely in The Complete Organic Pregnancy. It’s something I go out of my way to avoid. I had never looked at the bottom of the babe’s yogurt cups because it never occurred to me that Stonyfield, the environmentally-concerned company that makes her organic baby yogurt, a company so concerned with recycling that they give their old cups to another company to turn into toothbrushes, razors and the like (Recycline.com), would ever in a zillion years use plastic No. 6. Needless to say I was seriously pissed off. ...
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