I need a how to guide for becoming the green family I want to be!

I am reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver right now. And at the same time, I have been regularly reading The Zero Waste Home (a blog). What’s interesting to me is that I started both of these reading projects by reading some reviews and comments about them. And the comments I read went along the lines of “this is impossible!”, “what you’re asking me/us to do is not possible except for crazy zealots,” and “I don’t believe that your kids are all that thrilled by this plan for (zero waste or growing all your own food) as you imply they are.” And I admit that I read both the book and the blog with those thoughts in mind myself, kinda like I was watching a train wreck and couldn’t stop myself from rubber-necking on the side of the tracks. The problem isn’t that the ideas in these books/blogs are impossible - clearly they are possible as at least two families have made it happen. But the problem is that I don’t like to feel guilty and I don’t like to feel hopeless and that’s what both of these things do to me. I know for a fact that my home is still going to be producing waste and buying food from the grocery store a year from now. I know, with relative certainty that my son, husband, and I are all still going to be eating cookies, chips, and french fries in 2012. And I’m fairly confident that while I’ll have a garden again this year, I probably won’t be able to get much enthusiasm from my son or husband for eating what I grow. So here’s what I need:

  1. A step-by-step plan for moving from my cluttered, waste-heavy, junk-food laden lifestyle into something better
  2. Easy steps and hints for how to get a picky 3-year-old and an even pickier husband to eat those things we all know are better for us.
  3. Clear support for how to get myself to stop my own junk food frenzies and move into the 5+ fruits and vegetables, and so on I know I should be eating

And it’ has to be easy and fun would be good too. How can I move from knowing i should to taking action? Telling me all the reasons I shouldn’t let Jaryth eat Doritos isn’t helpful. I already am dreading visiting his doctor in March, I don’t need that guilt/dread from anyone else. I’m hoping that once I get past the obligatory “the world is ending and all America grows is bio-engineered corn and soybeans” lecture at the beginning of Kingsolver’s book, it will go into more concrete examples of how she moved into that mode. But I’m betting it won’t. I suspect that the only way I’ll be able to create a how to Guide for junk-food junkies who wanna become gaia-friendly is to write (and do) it myself. And that is FREAKING hard!