Liz's pick - Seventh Generation dish soap

This month's pick is Seventh Generation dish soap. I don't have a long-winded explanation as to why I rate it so high. It's pretty straight-forward.

I started using it regularly about the time that Jonas was born. One of the key merits to this soap is the way it cleaned the baby bottles. I never put the bottles into the dishwasher because they never came out crystal clean. They always had a trace of a powder-like substance dried on them. I don't know that it's harmful--probably not--but it just bothered me. So, I hand-washed them. Hand-washing with any dish soap produced a bottle that passed my cleanliness test, with one exception. The silicone nipples always looked "foggy" with a slightly greasy patina. That really wasn't going to cut it, especially after I just had figured out the solution to getting the bottles crystal clear. I would stand there in my sleep-deprived stupor, mechanically toweling off the nipples to get them nice and clear again. No luck. Then, one day, I used the Seventh Generation soap and everything was right again. Ahhhhh, what a relief. You know that saying about "it's the small things in life that count"? There is so much wisdom to that.

Sidebar: one day, as I was extolling the virtues of this soap to my husband, he matter-of-factly enlightened me that it's the surfactant in the dish soaps that make the silicone so "foggy". Who knew?

Anyway, getting back to my topic. The other reason that I like this soap so well is that it doesn't have any nasty stuff in it that's bad for the environment. Having lived in Central New York (the heart of the Iroquois confederacy) for several years, I became well-acquainted with the Iroquois concept of seven generations. The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy states, "In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations." That impact could apply to any decision: environmental, political, economic, etc. This idea made so much sense to me from the moment I heard it, and it became all the more powerful once I became a mother.

If only our nation's leaders would embrace this advice...