My 12 in 12 and One Small Change update

So I selected three areas of my life to make more important by giving myself monthly assignments in 2010: Environmental impact (One Small Change), outdoor play, and a personal social life. It's my 12 in 12 challenge.

January saw these efforts:

• No Buying. I did not buy anything all month, other than food, and in the process I saw my relationship with shopping in a different light.

• Playing outside - we packed a picnic and drove out to a pretty beach at a State Park.

• Social Life - I went to a friend's babyshower and my husband and I had a date night to go see Avatar.

Yesterday was the first day I could shop, and I did buy a few things that had come up: tights for Hypatia, gym shorts for Carbon, and the kids spent their accumulated allowances on toys. But our store behavior was very different from what it would have been before the No Buy month - we went into the stores with a list, and talked about what we were looking for (and what we were not looking to buy). The kids didn't beg and whine, and shopping took hardly any time at all.

Now we are trying to reduce/reuse plastic. I think this one is going to be harder than the simple ban on shopping was. I already messed up - yesterday I wasn't thinking and I bought a bag of Reeses Pieces (plastic bag).

Today's shopping trip to the co-op was also a big compromise on the plastic:

I wanted to buy certified humanely treated meat, but that came in plastic packaging.

I did reuse a shampoo bottle and refill it from the bulk section, and I did reuse plastic bags for snack food from the bulk section, such as that licorice in a sandwich bag. We had string bags for our produce, and we had our canvas shopping bags. We resisted all sorts of packaged snack and convenience foods.

But we bought mochi in plastic, and chapstick in plastic, and frozen juice has those plastic seal strips, and our homeopathic remedies came in plastic, and we were all thirsty and got drinks and one was in a plastic bottle, and even the soup box has a little plastic pour top!

This is going to be tough.