Summary: My guest this week is Rachel McFadden of HappyGreenBabies. We’re talking about Minimalism and Minimalist Parenting. You can listen to the show by clicking on the grey audio player below the transcript (at the bottom, just before the comments). Or you can read the transcript below. Carrie: Today we’re going to be talking about minimalist parenting. For those of you that have been following the blog for the last few weeks, Rachel is the mom behind the Green Mom’s Weekly post that we’re doing every Monday. So, she is the originator of that and we hope that you guys can all join and link up to her weekly green mom’s post on her blog. Okay so minimalism. Rachel: Yeah. Carrie: It’s definitely becoming a thing online. Like last night, I was doing a little bit of googling because I follow a few minimalist logs, but I was looking for some that were a little bit more geared towards moms and parenting. And I found several that I’ll mention later on, but how would you define minimalism? Rachel: The simplest thing I can say is a simple life. Simplifying the way that we live, and not cluttering it up with stuff. Enjoying the simple things, and not needing actual “stuff” to make us happy. C: Yeah, definitely. You know, it’s interesting because ten years ago the buzz word was “organization”. There were all these books, blogs and magazines centered around organization. And then there was a kind of an evolution into simple living and I think people realized, wait a sec. I don’t think we can organize this stuff, we have too much! You basically defined minimalism as a simple approach to life, making more room for life, having less stuff, less clutter. Many times when we find websites and blog and ebooks about minimalism we find a single person who has a very… R: …free life? C: Yeah! What’s the word I’m looking for? Nomadic! A nomadic lifestyle is enviable, but now that we’ve settled down with a family and children, how can we embrace minimalism? R: Sometimes we get bogged down… like when I was pregnant with my first, with all of the stuff that consumers feel they have to have to have a baby, that’s getting pushed on them by Babies R Us and all these massive baby stores and you have thousands of items you think you need. For this tiny little baby! I was kind of the same way. I got all this stuff and realized you don’t need it! What’s more important is spending time with the baby, like what we talk about on Green Moms Weekly – attachment parenting. My son is beside me, looking for his underwear. C: Even minimalists have underwear! R: Exactly. So after having my second child I realized that those things you really don’t need. What’s important is spending time with your baby. Being able to “wear” your baby, co-sleeping for me was one of the simplest things I could have done. It made my life a lot less hectic. The bedtime routine, what i remember with my first, trying to get him to sleep in a crib was never successful. He ended up in our bed anyway. So it just seemed simpler to cut out that whole struggle in life anyway. C: My first crib was a really, really large … laundry basket. R: Wow.That’s really cool. C: Another thing that we mentioned briefly is that minimalism seems to be kind of an offshoot from the organization movement of maybe the 80′s and 90;s. There were so many great books being written, blogs and websites and stuff. There was the Get Things Done (GTD) movement, and all the things that shot out from that. And then it was about simple living, so it transitioned from organizing to simple living. because I think people just realized, wait a minute, I have too much. Too much stuff, too much running around, too many activities, too much house, too much stuff in the house. I need to simplify it. And now it’s kind of even further trickled down to minima[...]
