Alice Thomson embraces "the good life" for a week with her family of four children: darning socks, earth friendly cleaning products, electric cars and even a wormery.

"Woodcutters are bad, I won’t be one," said my two-year-old son, Sam. His nursery school was having a problem recruiting lumberjacks for Little Red Riding Hood. The children all wanted to be spiders, ants or snakes rather than the wicked humans cutting down the rainforest. Children are the new eco-warriors. During the heatwave of 1976, I lay in bed thinking how many ice creams I could consume in one day, now children calculate their family’s carbon footprint. They’ve seen Ice Age and are horrified when I use only one side of a sheet of paper. "We’ll be extinct soon," said my six-year-old, Ludo, "and it’s all the grown-ups’ fault."

Children have come a long way since the Wombles of Wimbledon Common urged us to pick up our litter. Schools now have recycling bins. The Department of the Environment has an environmental snakes and ladders website for children. If you put apple cores in the bin not on the compost heap, you lose 6 places, if you leave the tap running when you brush your teeth, you slip down another snake. Parents are only slowly catching up. The Prince of Wales has given up his skiing holiday, David Cameron is putting a wind turbine on his house, M&S are sourcing green knickers. It’s a return to The Good Life with chickens, pigs and allotments. The only problem is adults also want caffé lattes and central heating. So when I announced we were going green for a week the children were thrilled. "No more baths, no more shampoo, no more flushing the loo. Can we camp?" said Ludo. My mother - who thinks a whole baked potato is an extravagance - told them stories of the Blitz years and said she would teach me to darn socks.

I was less sure that I wanted to spend my maternity leave as an eco-warrior. With a three-month-old baby and three other children, getting up in the morning is an achievement, trying to save the planet at the same time seems impossible. It’s even harder when you live in London. I made a list of my green credentials. I drive a second hand Volvo which scores a few points, we have energy saving light bulbs, we walk to school, we drink Fairtrade coffee, I use organic Ren cosmetics because they smell nice and our only pets are fish. Pets, according to the environmental website Green Choices, are not environmentally friendly. They use up valuable food resources. On the minus side, our family of two adults and four children produce five bins of rubbish a week, we went to South Africa for Christmas which will not have helped the ozone layer and when I look at my supermarket organic apple juice it has non-organic aromas.

I was going to have to clear out the kitchen, swap my detergents for Ecover ones, start using non-disposable nappies, drive a milk float and get a wormery. The children’s job was to go around the house turning off the lights.

Monday

I have bought organic cereals; the only problem is they have more sugar in them than a Mars Bar. The children are thrilled until I pour organic soya milk over the top. As they put on their uniforms, I realise that where once I was pleased that they came from China and cost very little, now I worry that they had to be shipped across the world. I must visit the second hand sale this week. “I am not wearing second hand pants,” says my four-year-old, Lily.

We walk to school on an organic sugar high feeling virtuous as the black 4x4s splash puddle water at us. Then I go to Fresh and Wild, the organic grocers. This is going to be expensive. The fruit looks incredible - strawberries, kiwis, asparagus, no hardship there. But the fruit and vegetables have mostly come from the other side of the equator. Only the broccoli and turnips are British. There seems to be little point in buying organic if the fruit has jetlag from flying halfway round the world.

I drink my organic café latte with two pea green mothers from school who are debating whether they should be getting a red American Express card which helps children in Africa. In the end they decide that they need the air miles from their old credit cards.
At teatime I tell my son to eat his fish fingers. “Think of all the starving children,” I say. “What about the cod?” he replies. “We shouldn’t be eating fish at all – or sausages – just pasta.” I suggest we keep a pig in the back yard for protein but we would have to kill it. Only the two-year-old volunteers to finish it off. The rest look appalled.

In the evening we share a bath. The children love it, my husband, Ed, enjoys splashing around with the baby. I need a shower afterwards to feel really clean.

We go to a drinks party clutching our organic wine. Our friends politely put it on a shelf in the kitchen. Ed has brought organic M&S for supper. It’s delicious but the amount of packaging fills up our bin quota for the week. The food is covered in cling film, tin foil, cardboard and plastic. The average person, I discover, throws away 26 tons of packaging during their lifetime.

Tuesday

The children are happy going green – they don’t even mind wearing the same clothes two days running - until I explain that plastic toys are out. Instead of playing with light sabres and Bob the Builder drills we are going to try old fashioned games such as Pictionary, hopscotch and charades, none of which use too much plastic. It’s exhausting for the parents endlessly playing Paper, Scissors, Stone but hopscotch becomes a new favourite.

I am beginning to feel like a 1950s’ housewife with my children playing on the street while I mend their clothes listening to the radio. The only problem is nappies. I have been avoiding this issue for 24 hours. My mother washed all our nappies in a twin tub. A friend who uses non-disposable nappies recommends that I don’t tell my husband if I am planning to wash the dirty ones with his shirts as he might rebel. In the end I find Ian at Number 1 for Nappies who promises to deliver some non-disposables and to wash them for us.

Working out a time when we are in and Ian is available is tricky but at last he arrives carrying a large bundle of freshly laundered towels. No nappy pins are involved. It is all down to the folding. He makes it look easy. However tightly I fold the nappy and cover it with the plastic wrap it is still twice the size of my disposables. It doesn’t fit under any of the baby’s trousers which is tricky in mid-winter. Zac is used to his slim, barely there disposables that don’t stretch his legs like a cowboy’s and screams until I take this bulky nappy off.

I don’t mind that the nappies have been used by other babies as they are heat sterilized. But surely all that washing damages the environment? Ian says they do everything to minimise their carbon footprint. He gives us a bin for the used nappies and tells us to leave it outside the front door at the end of the week. Origami proves easier, I struggle every two hours with my folds and pleats. Ian promises that they are developing an idiot-proof version for Dads. Until then real nappies are a step too far for me.

Feeling guilty, I walk with the baby to Green Baby and buy some Tushies gel free disposables and 100 per cent organic baby grows which are gorgeous and don’t look at all grungy. They also sell organic mattresses and baby mats. If I was having my first child I would go here as they are reasonably priced.

Wednesday

Ludo has finally rebelled. His organic homemade snacks are not going down well. His friends who have crisps and cheese strings won’t swap with him. So we go to Planet Organic with his brother who is given a miniature shopping trolley and we fill it up with organic fruit, muffins and brownies - which cost the earth but aren’t embarrassing.

The £8,000 G-Wiz electric car, however, is a huge hit with his friends. There are no worries about parking as, like many councils, Westminster allows G-Wiz drivers free parking spaces. You don’t have to pay road tax or the congestion charge and the electricity only costs about £400 a year. It’s perfect as long as you don’t want to go more than 40 mph or put a baby seat in the back. Only booster seats fit.

The children love driving around in this golf buggy. I find it more daunting. Men tend to cut you up a dinky car. Going up hill is nerve racking. My daughter wants a pink one, the boys want yellow. Ours is black with a chess board on the roof. I soon get used to cruising around silently along the streets and even our neighbours don’t mind jumping across the lead which snakes into our house each night. But my husband is unimpressed. “We don’t need a second car,” he says. And he’s right.

Thursday

The boiler has broken down. The temperature plummets, now we really are green. The baby wears a snowsuit in bed and the children sleep in socks and jumpers. I don’t miss the central heating but I can’t live without a bath and have to beg one off the neighbours. I book a holiday somewhere warm, then remember that I must ring The Carbon Footprint Company to offset my carbon emissions. It is surprisingly cheap, only £30 for a guilt-free trip.

Friends are coming round for supper so it is back to Fresh & Wild. This time I have been given a £18,000 Prius. I find this half electric, half petrol-fuelled car so complicated I stall outside the shop. But it does fit four children and the shopping. By the time the whole family has been round the shop we have three types of chocolate for a tasting, breads, bagels, crisps - this kind of organic is not a hardship just horrendously expensive. But then so are wind turbines and the Prius. Being green puts you in the red.

Friday

Dustbin day. We have borrowed a wormery for our vegetables, sorted out all our paper, cans, glass, plastic and organic waste. A friend who volunteered for a green collection ended up with a £50 fine for putting a yogurt pot in a glass recycling bin. I am nervous but I don’t need to worry. The dustmen chuck the whole lot in their cart. Next time I will have to drag it all to the recycling centre.

Saturday/Sunday

We are off to Devon on the train. We do this every fortnight so I am an expert in taking four children on a 125 until one of them wants to go to the loo. Going green in the country should be cheap, but the vegetable garden looks bleak. All we can scavenge is some sprouting potatoes. We can’t live on chutney and jam. Morrisons is not even khaki so we go to the Farm Shop where they have organic beef and we live as carnivores for two days.

That’s the problem with going green. Every time you do something you think may save the planet, you are harming it in another way. If I only use the washing machine once a week I need to buy more clothes which uses up more resources.

The Good Life is far more complex than buying an allotment next to Tom and Barbara. But it did make me realise the real environmental cost of our lifestyle. I am never going to live in a yurt, eat mung beans and wear hemp clothing but I do want to turn my carbon footprint into a dainty Jimmy Choo. size. So I am going to build that compost heap in the garden.