Easy! If you have a little one, use those items in an art project! By creating art with your toddler, you can glean a time of learning and togetherness out of an unneeded item. It might still end up in the landfill eventually, but at least you’ll have redeemed another use out of it.

Collages are terrific fun for small children. Use the back of a piece of junk mail or cereal box for your backing. Now find items to glue down in an interesting arrangement. Cotton from medicine bottles can become clouds or white birds. Lids can become wheels on a bus. Scraps of fabric, patterned envelope linings, and foil food wrappers can all be reused in this profitable learning time.

Another consideration about recycling and children’s art is what to do with the finished works. Sure, it’s greenest to go paperless and email Grandma with the latest exploits of your little ones, but if Grandma is not online yet, consider writing letters to her on the back of those little scribble drawings your tot makes. She’ll love her bonus “letter” from the grandbaby.

A number of household items can be recycled into playthings for a small child. Every child enjoys playing with a large cardboard box. Maybe you can even get your hands on an appliance box. These can be artistically remade into wonderful, whimsical playhouses, forts and castles that can be used indoors anytime or outdoors in nice weather.

Have you been tempted to pick up one of those cute plastic paint smocks for your toddler? If you can’t find one second hand at a yard sale or thrift shop, cut a large bib from an old shower curtain or table cloth, and it will work just as well. In addition, if you save your roll-on deodorant bottles, they can be rinsed out (pry the ball out first) and filled with finger paint. Replace the ball, and you have a paint roller that’s fun to draw with.

It is possible to spend a lot of money and generate a lot of landfill trash when buying art materials for your small children. By using your imagination and creativity, most of these items can be easily substituted with recycled materials found around the home.

For breastfeeding mothers the joy and closeness they feel to their baby while nursing is undescribeable. Occasionally however the baby will have unexplainable crying periods that doctors refer to as colic. While breastfeeding for the first year is best, formula feeding moms have choices in the formulas they can use to help easy the baby’s crying. However, for breastfeeding moms there is only one choice, the breast milk the mother produces.

There are things however that a mother can do to help change the consistency and nutritional aspects found in her breast milk. These include cutting out a few known gassy foods like broccoli and onions, to cutting just about everything out. Cutting everything out is often referred to as an Elimination Diet and is often recommended by doctors and pediatricians for mothers of gassy or colicy babies that are breastfed.

The Elimination Diet focuses on eliminating all hard to digest foods in a mother’s diet. It also includes eliminating all spices and seasonings except for salt and pepper. This is likely to make the food bland and at times tasteless, but if it helps your baby it would be worth it. On the Elimination Diet was created by William G. Crook, M.D. to help determine what different food allergies a person suffers from. It focuses on eating the least allergenic food in each of the food groups.

For the first two weeks it is suggested that the only meats you eat are turkey and lamb, partnered with baked or boiled potatoes or sweet potatoes. For a vegetable you can have cooked yellow and green squash. It allows you to have pears for your fruit, or pear juice, and rice as a side dish as rice is easy to digest. It suggests using a rice-based drink in place of milk to drink or cook with.

After the first two weeks you are allowed to slowly add foods back into your diet starting with items such as sunflower seeds, carrots, beets, salmon, oats, grapes, avocado, and peaches. Add one new food every four days and keep a journal documenting what you add, when you add it and what reaction, if any, that your baby has to it. After you have successfully added the above foods to your diet with no visible problems in your baby you can begin adding other foods like wheat, beef, eggs, nuts, and corn.

Once you determine that these food items are not bothering your baby it is safe to slowly begin adding back in the dairy products to your diet. Other items you should wait on include peanuts, shellfish, coffee, tea, colas and other beverages containing caffeine, chocolate, gas-producing vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, onions, green peppers), tomatoes, and citrus fruits.

Like any “diet” you may begin to feel deprived of your favorite foods or hungry when you first start on the Elimination Diet. It is important not to let yourself starve but rather to make and eating plenty of the foods you are allowed to eat at each stage. Once you determine the foods your baby’s belly can tolerate you will successfully be able to add back in some of your favorites.

Because breast milk is the only form of nutrition to most gassy and colicky babies, they normally respond to the diet change quickly, and begin to act happier and healthier relatively soon. For older babies who are still nursing as well as eating baby food and other solids, it may take longer to see a response and change in the fussiness. It is important to remember NOT to give up and to give both your body and your baby a chance to adjust to your change of diet.