Ok, I was on board with the whole getting rid of yucky lead tainted toys last year. I went along with switching out all of our plastic food containers for Pyrex ones (As a bonus, I can now I can actually see what is in them.) and dumping all of the kid's play food for the safe wooden alternatives. I even trashed the icky sippy cups for two of the "ok" ones and one Klean Kanteen. I also ordered one of these cool things to cut back on all the bottled waters I am prone to buy when out and about. (Love it.)
But now, it seems that there are many more creepy chemicals in our everyday items that I was not aware of. They are making the news more and more these days. Many of the issues involve phthalates (What are phthalates? Meta-Dad explained it well.), but a big chunk of the gunk is in our soaps, shampoos, lotions etc. According to the cosmetic safety data base, Skin Deep (Found via another recent mainstream news article that I cannot locate at this moment.), two of the top bad guys are parabens and fragrance (Yep, that fragrance article is from 2002. It sure took a while for word to get around.) It is all rather overwhelming and I spent a good chunk of my computer time last week plugging in our household items such as hand soap and shampoo with some rather disturbing results.
There are many less threatening options out there, but they can be expensive and
one has to be careful because just because several products from a company get good ratings, does not mean they all will. For example I discovered that Burt's Bees shampoo gets a pretty good rating, yet the Burt's Bees Baby Bee Shampoo gets a lesser rating.
It is all rather overwhelming so I am trying to pace myself and make just a few changes at a time. Today, after a quick trip to the health food store, I switched all the hand soap in our bathrooms to good old castile soap diluted in foaming hand soap pumps(Yes, all that 
crazy small print all over the bottle contains some pretty bizarre stuff, but I just emptied the bottle into the soap dispensers and tossed it. The important thing is that the ingredient list is nice and short.). I then traded in our old shampoo (it scored 7!) for the lovely Burt's Bees one pictured above, so nice. For the bath, we already use only my mom's homemade soaps (I have a standing farm eggs-for-soap deal with her. :-)) and her peppermint, spearmint and spice swirl flavors contain only natural essential oils. Next on my list is sun screen and possibly some make up. Whew!
