by Mayim Bialik

I spoke at The Down 2 Earth expo in Boston a few weeks back. The topic was green and holistic parenting, which I am technically qualified to speak about as the spokesperson for the Holistic Moms Network. Boston is an incredibly beautiful city, and my husband and our two sons and I took advantage of the historical sites and the excellent vegan food we discovered in Chinatown. It was a great trip.

What made the trip even better was that we stayed at the apartment of friends of ours who were visiting Los Angeles; thus we had the apartment to ourselves. It was in a wonderful part of Boston called Brookline, minutes from the subway, supermarkets, tons of restaurants and a laundromat. We are very close with these friends, so we felt very comfortable in their adorable place. In addition, they have a one year old, so there were plenty of toys for my boys (who are 4 1/2 and 20 months) to play with.

The trip was interesting, though, because these friends of ours are not obsessed (as I tend to be) about green stuff. I say this with absolutely no judgement or malice. They are wonderful caring and thoughtful people who are raising a securely attached and extended breastfed baby (which indeed are two features they share in common with all of my green and holistic friends in LA!), but their apartment was somewhat of a vacation for me. Let me explain how.

Their apartment featured some very nifty things we did not buy for our kids in the name of perhaps green frugality or maybe just stubbornness, including a rolling high chair, a bath tub seat so baby does not need a parent in the tub with them, a fancy jogging stroller, and an astonishingly disturbing (even to their taste and that of my boys) singing Elmo doll. Our friends also had many choices of plastic storage bags, paper towels, shampoo that actually sudsed up (mine has no SLS so it never lathers), and sweet-smelling bathroom spray. In general, actually, their apartment smelled much ‘cleaner’ than our house ever does, but I did not find it irritating to my allergies (which usually happens with commercial smells).

I had two distinct reactions to the differences between our sensibilities and those of our friends:

1) Some of this stuff is really awesome and helpful! My husband and I could not believe how freeing it was to sit our 20 month-old in the tub with his brother and let them play without us having to be in the tub with them! I know it sounds like a no-brainer, but we just have never had one of these little seats. It even had suction cups on the bottom so it sticks to the tub securely! The fancy jogging stroller did not hurt our wrists when we turned corners the way our $15 Target umbrella sad excuse for a stroller does. Bottom line: some of the things we have shunned are very nice.

2) Some of this stuff was fun to use on vacation but I don’t miss it. Everyone decides what they want to be passionate about, and not everyone is as serious about eliminating paper towel use as I am. I know that, and I am okay with it. It was super fun, though, to use paper towels with reckless abandon on this vacation, though! Correction: I wasn’t frivolous about this matter, but especially because they did not have a washing machine in their building, if things got messy, I went ahead and used those paper towels. And then I threw them out when I was done- I was like a crazy woman! Once at the Down 2 Earth expo, though, I perused the green living booths and joyfully purchased reusable washable fabric alternatives to plastic sandwich bags and baby wipes made from bamboo. There is still something that rings very true to me about the choices we make and I love those choices. It’s what works for us.

I really hope I don’t sound as pretentious as I think I sound about all of this. Part of my decision to live and parent green involves making choices about the environment I live in, which is also dictated a lot by my sensitive nose and skin. But this vacation out things in perspective a little bit. Plenty of wonderful people choose not to live this way, and that’s totally fine too.

And come to think of it, maybe I will go online right now and buy a bath seat for our little guy. Nothing wrong with that. But the singing Elmo? No way. I draw the line there. Way too creepy.

Mayim Bialik holds a PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA and is the spokesperson for the Holistic Moms Network (holisticmoms.org) and will be appearing in the season finale of the Big Bang Theory on CBS May 24. She hosts her own Facebook Page, The Official Mayim Bialik Page and does NOT have an account on twitter.

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