low-impact birthday parties

This weekend I stood in my kitchen holding up two packages of (already used) candles.

"Which one, honey?" I asked my husband. "The all-white beeswax candles or the pink petroleum based candles for Hypatia's cake?"

My husband made some comment about it getting to the point of asking if we should have soy-cheese or veal at the picnic we were having on the hood of our hummer.

Well - it wasn't THAT bad! Not hummer-bad, anyway. Maybe the party ended up being about Ford Explorer-bad.

It started well. We made our own invites from recycled paper. I ordered her gifts from Etsy to support handmade. But then the last minute stuff hit:

• I thought it would be fun to have beads for necklace making, so the kids could just take necklaces as their party-favors. I went a little overboard on beads at Joanne's.
• I was short on time, and there is a Target across the parking lot from Joanne's. I haven't stepped foot in a big-box store (other than Toys R Us) in six-months, but I really needed paper plates and napkins. Why did I need paper plates? For the party. Yep, I just don't have enough reusable table ware that would be easy to carry to the rock-gym.
• In Target (ick) all they had for party cups were plastic. I got the pink paper plates and napkins, but couldn't do the plastic cups. So I just got plain Dixie cups.
• Next I had Hypatia with me and we headed to the gluten-free store for flour. I bought three packages of cake mix, even though I knew I should just buy bulk flour and make the cakes from scratch. But the mix was there, so tempting, so easy ...
• Then we really hit the high-impact lane. We headed over to Costco, having not had any lunch and being REALLY hungry. That's never a good idea. They were pushing all sorts of samples for Super Bowl Parties, and we were so hungry we just grabbed samples left and right.
• After sampling some chicken wings, Hypatia wanted some for her party. A giant plastic bag of pre-cooked chicken wings from Foster Farms? SOoooooo not the way we have been buying our meat. I've only been cooking whole birds, mostly all organic and locally raised. But, OK ... for her birthday dinner.
• She also wanted a lot of fresh fruit, which isn't in season, but we bought it anyway and I tried not to think about the carbon-footprint to fly a mango from South America for my daughter's birthday.
• All of the produce and fruit came in giant plastic tubs that we can't recycle here, so all that just went in the trash.

In the end, we were able to compost all the cups, napkins, and plates. But I still felt so guilty about the footprint of the day ...