My Motivation - Avoidance of Neuroendocrine Disruptors and Big Box Mattress Stores

It all started one day. Maybe it was sunny, maybe it was gray. My son has gotten to the point where he'll soon be too big for the pack/play we inherited from my brother. Our son had already grown out his mighty pricey wooden crib, so what's another piece of furniture? My husband has been looking for and designing plans for an all wood toddler bed that he can build. But what about the mattress? (Tackling the obstacle of finding untreated wood for the bed is my husband's job.)

The little man has been sleeping on duvets from his grandmother since 3h after he was born, as he refused to tolerate the stiff, uncomfortable 'linens' they had at the hospital for him. Clearly, this kid already had standards he wasn't willing to compromise. And me, I've been working so hard to keep him away from all the bad shit in the world that I could. The boob juice wasn't flowing after a few months, so he got the organic melamine-free formula. He got organic goat milk. We made ALL of his solids from scratch using organic, locally-grown produce. The carbohydrates are organic, sometimes homemade. The meats, eggs, and dairy are pasture-fed and organic. His clothes are mostly hand-me-downs from my brother and a friend of mine. Those that are new are washed 3-5x to get rid of the potential insecticides coating the fabric. His toys are primarily wood with non-toxic, lead/cadmium/mercury-free and the plastic ones are as BPA- and phthalate free as we can get. We make his own baby soap and his own butt-wipe solution and use cloth wipes. He's cloth diapered with unbleached cotton prefolds with repurposed wool covers or second-use all-in-ones. ...

Wait a sec. Wool. That's flame-retardant. I wonder if I could make his mattress. Sure, it'd be a lot of work and I'd have to find a (local) shepherd that treated his flock well. But given the options of 1) buy a mattress from Big Bob's Mattresses (they thrown in free chemical flame retardants that mimic your hormones! yay!; 2) fork over a grand or more for a fancy organic mattress; or, 3) be self-reliant and make my own mattress for the wee one, I chose #3. After all, we've gotten to the point where we are slowly but surely making our way off the grid - growing our own food, supporting local agribusinesses and so on - why not go all in. And this way, I know what's IN the mattress and how to care for it.

But let me return to why this is a battle worth fighting. As I mentioned, almost all textiles including clothing and furniture, are sprayed, doused, dunked or otherwise soaked in chemical flame retardants. Up until ~1979, the major ones were PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). These were in anything from the pillow you lay your head upon at night to the transformers atop your street's utility poles. But it turned out that these chemicals were turning up in animals, notably fish, but also other wildlife. As research progressed, it turned out that PCBs bioaccumulated. That is, whatever ate the fish ended up with the fish's PCB load. Whatever ate that animal, ended up with the cumulative PCB load from that animal that at all the fish. Now, it wasn't just limited to animals, since animals fertilize plants too. As you may have already guessed, the PCBs ended up in plants and the fruits/veggies they produced. So, in this way, the PCBs ended up in another section of the food chain. Lucky us, we have the EPA and other associated gov't entities that do just a bang up job protecting us from ourselves. PCBs were banned in the late 1970s and replaced with an equally stupid group of chemicals called polybrominated diphenyl ethers. For the sake of brevity, let's just say that the PBDEs act much like PCBs. Aside from the issue of bioaccumulation, these chemicals are effectively neurotoxins. Not necessarily in the same sense as botox (Botulinum toxin) is neurotoxic, but in the sense that it is disruptive to the normal functioning of the nervous system. PCBs and PBDEs both mimic hormones in the human body, outcompete the endogenous hormones for binding sites but do not activate the receptors. In layman's terms, these chemicals bully around our own hormones and 'squat' on the receptors but do no good for the body since they don't trigger the receptor to do anything. This might not be so bad if we didn't actually need our hormones to do their job.

As many parents know, babies and young children spend a significant amount of time asleep, usually on a mattress. (For more detail, check out: http://www.babysaver.org/cribdeathcause.htm) Personally, after all the work I did keeping myself health and dosed full of useable vitamins (surely I'll create another blog about the adequacy of vitamins in the US) while making this baby and the time and effort we spend meeting h is nutritional and emotional needs, I sure as heck will spend the time keep that kind of shit away from his little body while he sleeps. Sure a fan might help to keep the gases from hanging around his head while he sleeps, but he's no longer a SIDS risk. The chemicals can and do still enter his body from contact with the treated materials. So my solution was to tackle this adventure now, "long" before he really needs the mattress.

Step 1: find local, organic farmer who sells raw wool fleece (www.123farm.com). Done
Step 2: clean fleece. In progress, certainly not as easy as I confidently told myself it would be. We're on month 3 of biweekly cleaning/drying/airing out. Probably I could do this more efficiently given the proper tutorial and equipment. But I'm not made of gold. Oh, and this is only the first of three or more batches! (As an  aside: there are places online to buy already cleaned wool/wool fleeces, so don't worry about this step too much.)
Step 3: Figure out a design for the mattress so that it can be fluffed, restuffed, washed, etc. without too much hassle
Step 4: Consider an organic latex core. Not sure I'll do this, in part because of the cost, but also because the latex can't be used for anything else once all the kids are done with their mattresses. Yes, we're planning on having more, so I better get steps 1-3 done soon.
Step 5: Implement, sit back and enjoy the masterpiece, realize kid will outgrow the dimensions sooner rather than later. Panic, but then recognize that it was done once so just modify the existing 'structure'. Panic again when I realize I might have to do this up to 4 more times!
Step 6: Retire and consume virgin margaritas and pina coladas (yep, I can't drink alcohol).

To wrap things up, I welcome you to this blog and hope you enjoy it. I hope even more that I can help some of you who may be thinking about doing this yourselves realize that you can do this. With that said, let's free ourselves of commercial shenanigans, corporate greed, and cultural ignorance! :D