Too Cold for a Jog? Run in Circles to Burn Off Parenting Steam

Mike Adamick (Cry It Out!) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 14:48:00 GMT

What do you do when it's too cold outside to take a run, yet your treadmill is on the blink? Radioactive Girl has the answer. Head down to your basement, deposit your children on a trampoline mattress and run as fast as you can in circles. Some may simply call that parenthood, that feeling of running in endless circles -- but I call it awesome. After all, she did a 7-minute mile! In her basement.

She says: "Running laps around the basement has an extra bonus. There are hurdles ...or remote control dinosaurs and a bunch of crap laying around, but they worked like hurdles. Although you feel a little like a mouse on a wheel running around and around, but going nowhere." Again, that sounds a lot like parenthood, but whatever.

I think it's genius. I don't have a basement, but the living room looks big enough if I got all Martha Stewart on it and rearranged crap -- although a coffee table hurdle might do me some good. I saw on the news last night that rain is headed our way next weekend. Who knows? I may follow Radioactive Girl's lead and dump the kid on a mattress while I make like a mouse and sprint happily around the room.

Unless, of course, there are better ways to burn off steam after a long day with the kids? (Get your mind out of the gutter, people -- I'm talking about exercise here ....)

Deconstructing MommyTips.com

Patti — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:05:00 GMT

MommyTips could use a little help. For starters, as recently discussed here on Strollerderby, the gender bias inherent in the name needs to go. These are parenting tips, and it wouldn't hurt to take a hint from Parent Hacks and go gender-neutral. Let's all just assume (correctly) that fathers parent their children, come up with good ideas, and want to include themselves in parenting communities. Thank you. Moving on.

I don't want to continue to compare and contrast MommyTips with Parent Hacks, but they're both working toward a common goal of sharing unique parenting fixes with their readership and it's impossible not to compare them. Unfortunately MommyTips comes up short in ways that could easily be resolved and anything useful they're providing gets buried under crap. First and foremost, the site design. I had to do a double-take in my address bar to see if this was a Geocities site, and then check my calendar to see if it was 1997. This is not good design, and if your site is intended to provide information you need people to be able to find it. One tiny "tip" on the front page in the middle of a sea of advertisements, amongst which I had trouble finding the category links that would lead me to the rest of the tips, is not helping parents find what they need. May I introduce you to TypePad?

A little bit of editing wouldn't hurt. I don't need three individual tips about how baking soda paste will relieve the pain of a bee sting, I need it once. Credit it to three people if you must, but post it once. And don't post it in ALL CAPS. Or with Random caPital Letters or painful misspellings. Or with cream of mushroom soup (okay, that one's a personal nitpick). Powers That Be At MommyTips: please don't let your contributors look like fools. They have some great ideas that are completely obscured by grammatical chaos and administrative indifference. If editing is not your personal strong suit, paste things into a Word document and run them through a spelling and grammar check, then paste 'em back into your site. If you want to appear professional (and those eighty kajillion ads you're running tell me that you do), you need to polish your content.

Bottom line: there's always room in my life and in my bookmarks for another website providing good solutions to my parenting issues. But if I can't wade through the muck to find a mommy tip, I'm going to have to continue to make do with only a parent hack.

Strollerderby : mommytips

Too Cold for a Jog? Run in Circles to Burn Off Parenting Steam

Deconstructing MommyTips.com