No Impact Week- Tuesday

We managed to make it through today using only cloth diapers...PooFest seems to have ended. w00t! I threw away the plastic thing that holds the bread bag closed today...I think that's it.

Today's challenge: Alternative modes of transportation.

This is a tough one for me. We don't drive much. Hardly at all, really. The kids walk to school. We live three big blocks (about a mile) from The Man's work. We go to the grocery store (less than 2 miles) once a week. And then on Tuesdays, Boy 3 has gymnastics (6 miles away). That's it. We fill up the van with gasoline around once a month.

For Christmas, I got a kick-ass Huffy cruiser. I plan on taking that to the grocery store, probably hauling food in the kid wagon thing that has been sitting forlornly in the garage since I gave my mountain bike to Boy 1. I don't know if I'm tough enough to ride it in the cold, but I'm going to try. Right now we're good on groceries, I don't need to go again until Sunday.

As I was preparing for today's challenge I knew it fell on gymnastics day. I can't bike 12 miles round-trip yet, not in this weather with Boy 3 and Girl 2 in tow. And a couple of the roads are really busy, we wouldn't be home by dark, and I'm just not ready for that yet. Are these cop-outs? Maybe. I don't think so though.

I decided we would take the bus. I checked out the Valley Ride website to figure out costs & routes. They have this amazing trip planner that allows you to key in your starting point and destination and then tells you the various ways you could ride the bus to get there. So awesome. The problem I ran up against is that there is no way to get him to gymnastics by 4:00, if we take the bus. If I picked him up at school, and we ran (with Girl 2 in tow, having woken Girl 1 from her nap just to meet the boys at school) we might be able to catch a bus that would get him there within 5 minutes of start time. Maybe. So we drove. If Boy 3 gets moved up to the next level of gymnastics, I will try to pick a time that allows us to take the bus.

Since we drove, I did a batch of errands in the area. There is a bank and a thrift shop right in the neighborhood. I deposited our checks & shopped (unvictoriously) for diaper covers. A bonus: today was fill a bag free day at the thrift shop. I got a stack of books for free. Score!

The second part of today's challenge was to take action. Today President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act. Today I signed a petition encouraging Congress to find the funding to support the bill. Please consider signing it too.