May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.
-Irish Blessing

Monday, November 21, 2011

Exercise = Bad For The Environment?

I have been thinking about this one for a while. Especially on laundry days. Which lately, with the advent of colder temperatures and thicker clothes, has been almost every day. I usually exercise six days a week, early in the morning - if I'm lucky (my kids are eeaarrrlyy risers)- before the kids are awake. My husband runs three to four days a week as well. So now that I've set the groundwork we can examine if exercise is bad for the environment.

I can't speak for others, but when I exercise, especially when I run, I sweat and it's not pretty. So, before 6:30am I have dirtied my first pair of clothing for the day. If my husband has run too, ditto for him. Our girls participate in an hour long gymnastics class once a week and they, you guessed it, get sweaty. So, once a week they wear clothes - sweats, shorts and leotards, for one hour, which must then be washed. I have inadvertently made an environmentally conscious effort by changing my exercise time from the girls' nap time to before they wake up in the morning so now I only have to shower once a day rather than twice. But still, when I think about all of the extra sweaty laundry that would not exist if we did not exercise and the occasional extra showers and baths that are taken to "freshen up", I wonder about my impact on the environment?

It's probably not as bad as I imagine, we do now at least have a high efficiency washer and dryer. Limiting myself to one shower a day conserves water as well. Not smelling fresh is not an option so any amount of showers or cleaning products which are necessary to ensure this are justified for my own and others' olfactory satisfaction.

I think I'm just fed up with laundry :)

2 comments:

  1. Mandy,
    I wanted to email you but couldn't find your email address. I was reading this new blog and her story was very similar to mine/ours. Her blog is called Rainbow After the Storm. She's currently pregnant so beware. Her daughter has SLOS. I've never heard of this but obviously it's a genetic disorder that caused her daughter to have failing kidneys in utero. It seems very similar to Potters. Her situation that is but SLOS seems very broad. I just wanted to share this with you since I know you're always researching too. You can email me at molly.king@comcast.net is you want. I'm probably going to call my high risk dr and make sure this was tested when they did John Michael's chromosome test.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for sharing, Molly. I think I found her blog and had time to read just a little today. We have had chromosome testing done on both the boys and then an autopsy on Eli which we had studied by a geneticist. The testing showed no abnormalities inconsistent with the BRA or reason to believe another syndrome was involved but this is definitely worth checking out so thanks for bringing it to my attention!

    ReplyDelete

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...