Month: April 2004

When I initially poured through the list of sites to be reviewed, the title Of Reading To My Kid immediately jumped out at me and I knew it was something I wanted to check out. As a fellow rapidly approaching 30, I have already begun a small library of children’s books for the child I hope to have someday – so the title definitely piqued my curiosity. Imagine my delight when I got to the weblog and found out its intent. The purpose of the blog, in the author’s own words is as follows :

The weblog is an exploration of the issues involved in children’s literature and reading to a child, which seems to me both political and emotional. It’s intended for parents, publishers, authors, critics, and anyone interested in books for young readers.

Fantastic! This would be something I would be very interested in, and I immediately plunged into the page.

The blog is written by the mother(referred to only as “E”) of a little girl who is referred to as “Tulip” – in homage to the character of the same name from the Rosemary Wells book, Benjamin and Tulip . The core of the blog is the review of all the books that the author reads to her little girl, and they are skillfully intertwined with a few short tales of her daughter’s exploits (Amazing Grace on the subway) which are always delightful to read. All the reviews are very well done, and I even picked up a few solid recommendations that I will have to look into. My only complaint, if you could call it that, was that there simply weren’t enough because the archives only went back to the beginning of February. I was able to read the entire site in one sitting, and found myself eager for more. This is a small bone of contention, however, as I am sure that the material will grow and grow over time.

The layout is very basic and is a page hosted on blogspot. Seeing as how this is a fairly new endeavor, I can understand hosting it there for now – everyone has to start somewhere. One thing that did interest me, though, was the incredible number of links on the sidebar that pointed to various other sources for children’s literature, and I thought this was simply fantastic.

The blog certainly wouldn’t be of interest to anyone who has no reason to be interested in children’s literature. To those who are interested, however, this page provides an invaluable resource in the way that it shows you both the good and bad points about the titles selected by the author, and does so in a friendly and easily readable way.

My suggestion to the author would be to continue the great work she’s doing and eventually looking at hosting the site on her own .com domain and sprucing up the presentation so it would be more easily accessible to the masses.

A fantastic site, with only the lack of material preventing it from being a perfect 5/5!

Reading to My Kid

The Mommy Blog is the brainchild of Mindy, a mother of three living in the San Francisco Bay area. The layout is fun and quirky, with a header featuring a variety of ‘mommy-centric’ quotes and a picture of a playful, laughing woman — presumably Mindy herself. Based on the design, I expected a whimsical look at the life of a mother, with a touch of humor in each post.

I dug into the archives, which go back to late 2002, and found pretty much what I expected — lots of stories and anecdotes about Mindy’s kids, and the experience of bringing up a group of youngsters. The posts are entertaining, ranging from ‘awwww!’ moments about the cute and innocent things the kids are saying to the harried (but often hilarious) pull-out-your-hair moments that mommy Mindy occasionally endures. Taken together, the stories paint a full and eye-opening picture of the ups and downs — but mostly ups — of motherhood, as seen through one witty, upbeat woman’s eyes.

The entries are fairly sparse until the summer of 2003, when the post frequency grows to several each week, and later to multiple posts just about every day. This is also the time when Mindy begins to expand her range of topics a bit more, and write about other areas of her life. The majority of material is still devoted to her ‘kidlets’, but the recent posts provide a more complete picture of the author. And the best news is that Mindy has been downright prolific in 2004, entertaining her readers daily with a variety of tales, snippets and links to other sites.

Mindy’s doing a fantastic job of letting her full personality shine through — it’s fantastic to see how her weblog has grown from a rarely-updated record of the best and worst of her kids’ adventures into a creative outlet, filled with enjoyable and often humorous snippets of her life. Many of the features and ‘extras’ that you’d find on other blogs are here — comments, a search box, a CafePress shop, and various blogrolls — but it’s the writing that really sets this site apart. If you’re interested in reading about motherhood, or you’re just looking for an entertaining read, then you should really enjoy The Mommy Blog. I give the site 4.5 out of 5.The Mommy Blog

My first impressions of “The Mommy Blog” were very good- a very professional looking site with a nice title bar and a tasteful colour scheme, which is skinnable.

I headed straight for the About Me page after a quick glance around. It is informative and makes it clear that the author, Mindy, is a working Mum with three kids. The rest of the site is pretty straight forward – a three bar layout with links, archives, search boxes and um… more links. I sometimes wonder whether all the stuff people put in sidebars is really necessary, or whether people just put stuff in them because they can (especially MT users, who are offered a plethora of features of this kind). Not sure how useful they are though – something that crossed my mind whilst I was looking around this site especially. I am also not a big fan of loads of linkage. Less is better for me as I am never going to have time to click 100 or so links and read a weblog too. As impressive as the site looks, it is designed commercially by a third-party, so I can’t give the author too much credit for this, though I guess she could have had some input in to the process. No disrespect, the overall feel of the site is a good one, just a few niggles really.

Ok, on to the content then. Well the major theme, as can be ascertained by the title itself, is the personal life of Mindy and her family. These are all honest, fairly in depth and often amusing (along the lines of “don’t kids say/do the funniest things”). Its pleasant enough to read with few spelling or grammar mistakes and I felt like I soon became a part of Mindy’s world, particularly her home-life.

One criticism of the blog though is there isn’t much else besides the home-life stuff for readers to get their teeth in to – unfortunately it is a bit of a one-horse blog in that respect. Ok so there are a few memes, links to other blogs and witty topics as well as a couple of work related posts, but generally these are sparser than the family posts. Fine, if you like families. In fact great, I expect (at least if the comments are anything to go by). Not so fine though if you like, say, motorbikes or new-age therapy or Marxist philosophy or something. Best off trying elsewhere for those kind of things, methinks.

Overall then, reading “The Mommy Blog” is a pleasant experience and gives people a great insight in to family life. I would say it probably only has lasting appeal to those with similar lifestyles though, despite the flash template.
The Mommy Blog

Well, I was a little skeptical about reviewing this blog at first, but after I went through a lot of the archives, I figured, “hell, why not”. I will review it and be objective about it.

When I first heard the title “The mommy blog”, I assumed that it was going to be a blog all about a lady and parenting.

The first thing I saw upon entering the page was , a photo of a lady at the very top of the page. To the left hand side was a photo of her child. Well at least I figured that’s who it was.Well after reading a few entries on her main page, I was a little confused.
She mostly talked about her job and her co-workers. The couple of times that she mentioned her children, she talked about them “throwing up”. Now i can understand when children are sick. I have children of my own. But I really don’t think too many people would like to hear the details of when they threw up. What I mean by details is, what it looked like ect. Then there were more entries about her job and co-workers. I started asking myself “why in the hell is this called the “mommy blog”.

At that point I started going through her archives. Believe me, she has a lot of them.

It was in her archives that she started to talk more about her children and her husband. My favorite posts were the ones where she talked about the conversations she had with her children, word for word. They were very funny. Kids can say the strangest things and act so grown up for their age.Several of her posts had only one or two lines. A lot of them really didn’t have anything to do with the blogs title. Some of the posts were very confusing. I even went to her “About Me ” link which is located on the left hand side, to see if I could get a little more info on this lady. But there was very little about her.

The best thing I liked about the blog, was the layout and design. It’s a 3 column page (“which I don’t usually care for), which looked good. She had links on both the left and right hand sides, a few photo’s here and there of her children (which are really cute) and of other people. On the right hand side, she even has a “Blog Status” section which i found quite interesting because you don’t see all that many bloggers with those.

To conclude the review, I would just like to say, it would be o.k. to visit from time to time, but I wouldn’t visit on a regular basis.The Mommy Blog

Mondo Irlando is one of those blogs that seems to capture my attention even though I sincerely wish it didn’t. Maybe I’m too easily sucked into things for my own good. Maybe not. Who knows? Enough with the philosophy.

I’ll get the general broo-hah-hah about the aesthetics of the blog out of the way first – it’s boring and the layout doesn’t help break up each post enough to make them very easy to read and whilst it’s the job of a blog reviewer to review the content, I am one of those reviewers who ascribes to the “looks help” type of thinking and that a blog should reflect it’s owner in it’s appearance and compliment the writing. It’s not a very old blog but there are already loads of entries to read and they’re all of a very high caliber when it comes to spelling and grammar (for those of us who think such things are important).

In a word, the blog is intriguing but I think it’s also inflicted with a touch of the blog version of ADD. From one topic to another, it’s an eclectic collection of stuff about movies, weird facts and observations on pop culture. It very, as we Australian’s like to call it, “full on”. You have to be paying complete attention to get the full effect because the moment you relax and get distracted it’ll slap you in the face with something strange like certain comments about spam mail advertising equipment for enlarging certain bits of male anatomy and then a fact of the day – babies are born without knee-caps. They develop between the ages of 2 and 6.

See?

All in all, Aaron (or The Duke as he likes to call himself – in bold and everything), provides an entertaining twist to the normal review sites. He’s got a sense of humor that tickles my fancy, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on who you are. I found him quite refreshing and pleasant to fumble through, and his current review on The Passion of the Christ is really very good!

Whatever Happened To: Snow, who released the wonderful Informer back in the early nineties. “Informer, bahiddilly didilah didilah didialh heeeeyylo, I lick yo boom boom down.” I’ve often wondered the same thing. Mondo Irlando