Schmidt's Natural Deodorant

Another great product for today's active mother from Schmidts Beauty

"Schmidt's Deodorant is made from a signature blend of all natural ingredients that really works. Our product effectively neutralizes underarm odor and absorbs wetness without the use of harmful chemicals."

With the wonderful and warm spring that we have had in Oregon, I've been able to really give this product a try. Our garden is booming and Coral is loving our trips to the park so I have been lucky to have Schmidt's natural deodorant on hand. At the end of each day I have been so pleased that I don't have much of an odor at all!

I have been looking into natural deodorants for a while since I don't want to expose myself to the chemicals that are in conventional products. I have been happy and not-so-happy with a few different natural stick deodorants that come in plastic tubes. When I found Schmidt's, I was interested in trying to "think outside the plastic" as the say and use their baking soda based product that comes in glass.

The glass jar of deodorant comes with this handy little spatula that helps scoop the paste out with. Take a pea size lump and smooth over your underarms. It feels grainy at first but the shea butter in it smooths it out. You can see the amount I put on my hand below and once it's rubbed in, it just has a light powdery surface.

I got to try three varieties: Ylang-Ylang + Calendula, Cedarwood + Juniper and Unscented. I really liked both scents and Schmidt's has just added two new varieties so check them out!

They have generously offered two deordorants to our readers so enter the raffle below and check out their Facebook page. Let them know we sent you!

raffle will run from 5/10-5/17

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Adventures in Repurposing

While we are on the topic of green living with our Earth Days month, I wanted to share with you some fun ideas for the home and garden. Here in Oregon, we have mild seasons so getting the jump on summer with a green house is a great way to extend the growing season for veggies and flowers. I love my little veggie garden and around this time of year I am chomping at the bit to get out there and plant. The down side is that we still have danger of a light frost until May. So my project I want to share with you today is building a tiny, re-purposed  and attractive greenhouse. This mini green house is made from 6 old windows that we bought at an estate auction but can also be found at recycled home building supply stores like Habitat for Humanity's Restore.

We used four windows that are the same size and two that are a bit skinnier for the roof.

Here is Matt lining the up to be perfectly square. I grew impatient with his attention to detail but in the end it was appreciated because the 4th window we added to the base was the door and it swings closed easily on it's hinges. We added a small latch with a simple hook and loop.

Here is the finished project. You can see the the roof is still open, which is fine for ventilation in our area which is plant hardiness zone 8. If you are in a harsher zone, a bit of clear plastic stretched over these triagle shaped gaps would be great. Find your zone here 

I planted these spinach and basil seeds 3 weeks ago, which is very early for basil here. They are happy and growing is their little glass house!

Some things to watch for when using old windows is often the paint can flake off and contaminate edible plants. I scraped off the inside of these windows and continue to keep on eye on the surface as moisture and temp created more peeling. I haven't had a problem with it but use common sense, which I know you will.

More fun ideas for re-purposing items this spring can be found on Pinterest.com but here are some of my favorites and hopefully, soon to be in my house!

GroVia Kiwi Pie Fitted Diaper

I was given the opportunity to review the new GroVia Kiwi Pie Fitted diaper today. These are a new addition to the GroVia line, and are American made! These fitteds have an adorable cotton fabric on the outside and the inside is a blend of micro-modal and pima cotton.

Micro-modal fabric is a great sustainable fabric option which is made from beech trees and is fifty percent more absorbent than cotton! It also stays softer longer due to it's resistance to hard water mineral deposits. We have very hard water at our house and I can already tell that this diaper is staying nice and soft despite that! 

 Like all fitteds, the GroVia Kiwi Pie does shrink a bit after prepping, but I found that the shrinkage was very minimal compared to other diapers I have prepped.

The GroVia Kiwi Pie is a one size fitted and has one set of rise snaps. These fitteds are sized from 10 - 30 pounds, and I definitely think that this would have fit Ava great when she was a newborn. 

The rise snaps are offset slightly from each other, which helps to reduce bulk. I really like this feature as I think it gives a nicer front look when the rise is snapped down.

Each GroVia Kiwi Pie comes with two four-layer inserts that simply lay inside the diaper. Most fitteds I have tried snap into the diaper, so I was surprised that these were lay-in soakers. I think it gives a nice clean look to the outside of the diaper though, with no snaps on the outside.

I really love that the soakers each have the cute print on the back of them! This is a great feature if you have multiple Kiwi Pies and want to ensure that the correct soaker stays with the correct diaper.

The two soakers snap together on one end, which helps keep them from moving around too much. This is where my only complaint with the diaper came in. I found the snaps here to be very "soft," meaning that they didn't click together nicely and they didn't hold very strongly. It's not a huge issue with this diaper since it really doesn't affect function, and it could be just this particular diaper too.

I found the fit to be really nice on Ava. You can see that we got a really trim fit between the legs. I love the ruffly look of a serged diaper, and the only bummer is that I have to hide the cute pattern under a cover!

This side view shows how trim this fitted is! This is with both soakers inside; for a smaller baby with the rise snapped down you could easily just use one soaker to get a nice trim fit.

The snap layout is just like my GroVia shells and we got a really similar fit to what we get with those. I love when diapers fit nice and smooth in the front like this.

Here is the fitted with my GroVia owls snap shell over it. Typically when I use the GroVia soakers I have the shell on the middle rise setting, but the fitted is a little bulkier so I opened the rise all the way up to fit over it.

I did struggle a little to get the sides of the fitted completely covered by the shell. You can see here the Kiwi Pie peeking out a tiny bit. It seemed to me that the Kiwi Pie was just a touch wider than the shell here so it was a little tricky to get it all to go under the shell. I have not had any wicking though so my cover job holds up!

Overall we have really enjoyed this fitted. Ava is a super wetter at night, and this fitted worked well with just a little extra absorbency added. For a medium to normal wetter at night you probably just need this fitted by itself. (For comparison, we usually use an angel-folded baby sized prefold with an infant sized prefold tri-folded as an insert, and both of those are soaked by morning!) For day time use, I can get a really long time out of this fitted, so it is one that I reach for if I am going out for a while and don't want to worry about leaks! 

GroVia Kiwi Pie fitteds retail at $27.00 and come in six adorable prints! Considering the fantastic fabrics, print choices, absorbency, and the fact that these are made in the USA the price is totally worth it to me. I highly recommend these fitteds!