Growing up in Washington, D.C. it is impossible to avoid being caught up in some body's cause, unless you live in a cave or have a heart of stone. There were many crazy zealouts there, someone is always picketing something, usually more than one group every day! Once I heard someone from the feminist movement giving a speech about how Barbie should have realistic breasts and hairy, yes I said hairy, armpits and legs so that little girls don't grow up feeling like they have to shave to fit in to society. Now tell me, who has time to fight for something so ridiculous? Not I said the blogging lady. However, there were many causes that I truely enjoyed being part of, things that I continue to feel passionately about to this day. One of them is taking better care of our mother earth. I really am not a granola eating, tree hugging vegetarian girl or anything, I love my super-rare steak just like the next girl, but taking care of our earth just feels like common sense to me. I do think global warming is a very big deal, it makes me wonder what quality of life will be like for future generations. Now tying this into the church-going girl, I feel most strongly about taking care of the home that Heavenly Father created for us. So, it makes me especially ticked off that UTAH does not have a decent recycling program, why is this? You would think that of all the people on the earth, Mormons would appreciate the earth the MOST because we know it's history and importance in the life to come.Ok, now that I'm down from my soapbox, I would like to say, that recycling has always been a big deal to me, but lately I've been trying to kick it up a notch. I found out Bountiful City has a recycling center and so for the last few months we have been recycling all of our plastic. I have to say that last year when we found out that any kind of paper including cardboard (you wouldn't believe how many things come in boxes, cereal, fruit snacks, everything!) could be recycled at our school and then the money was turned into books for the library that the recycling bug bit me hard and we started recycling paper products in full force. So it was natural to take the next step into recycling everything else that we could. I tried to make it a family affair so my kids could learn the value of all of this. It used to be that we would never have enough room in the garbage can for everything that needed to be chucked. We would sneak extra bags into our neighbors cans and talked a few times about ordering a second can, but I just couldn't do it. Since we started recycling our plastic and papers, we always have extra room in the can and I can't tell you how happy this makes me! :) - like this. On Friday we took our one months recycling to the recycling center and it filled the back of our van with the seats down! I had to take a picture, it made me feel so good. 
