archive for January 2007

Tips for Traveling with Kids

Asha from Parent Hacks was asked to guest-blog at National Geographic’s Travel Blog on the topic of her favorite family travel tips.   She (and her Parent Hack contributors) give some great suggestions, including doing some research at sites like Parentography.  I won’t spoil all the fun, but one of the suggestions is to make sure your child has ID on them — using some conventional methods (bracelets, etc.) or by writing with permanent market on your kid’s tummy! 

Family Travel: Kids in the car

Michelle over at Scribbit wrote an article today that mentioned a nifty little website to help you brainstorm activities to do with kids on road trips.  Mom’s Minivan features well-known activities like the License Plate Game and the Scavenger Hunt, but also some ones I had never heard of like counting cows.  Personally, we rely heavily on our portable DVD player and endless loops of the Dora the Explorer cartoon.

Most people aren’t heading out on driving vacations much at this time of year, but Mom’s Minivan is worth bookmarking and referring to before your next trip.

What are some of the games you play in the car? 

 

Our Second Winner!

We’ve surpassed 200 reviews and excursions on the site and awarded our second $100 prize to bubbles76angel, a “first time mother to a bright, bubbly toddler who demands lots of room to run around, things to climb, and treasures to unearth.”  She lives in San Francisco, CA and has already contributed four excellent reviews to Parentography.

We had a great first week thanks to all of you!  Many, many blog mentions, thousands of visitors from all over the country (and world), and lots of fantastic feedback about what we can do to improve the site.  We’re working non-stop to fix bugs, add features, and make every part of the Parentography experience smoother and better for everyone, so stay tuned and let us know how you think we’re doing!

Please keep telling your friends about the site and encouraging them to visit, register, and contribute.  We’ve got a long road ahead of us, but if we all do our share, Parentography will become an awesome resource for all of us!  I know I’ve been inspired to visit a lot of the places that people have written about and feel a lot less fearful about taking our daughter to cities we’ve never visited as a family — and we’ve even found a couple of new things to do in our home town of San Diego!  That’s what this is all about!

 

Positive Discipline

Our daughter is quickly appoaching her second birthday, but she seems to have already mastered some of the behaviors normally associated with that age (like tantrums, expert manipulation of her parents, etc.).  To better prepare myself for even greater challenges ahead, I recently started reading a book called “Positive Discipline“.  So far, I feel like this book makes a lot of sense, although I recognize that there are many different parenting philosophies that work successfully.  Ours, like most parents, is probably a hybrid of many, but Positive Discipline seems to offer some great tips for raising a child to be self-confident, caring, and independent — hard to argue with those things.  I’m only a little way into the book and haven’t even really tried any of their techniques yet, so I’ll keep you posted on how these things work in practice. 

I was referred to the book by some friends who had a very ‘active’ two-year old son a year or so ago.  They loved the book and saw improvement in their son’s behavior when they implemented some of these teachings.  If any of you have tips for raising great kids, I’d love to hear about them — this is one area where there is no such thing as too much information! 

Server Maintenance

These posts should usually come out before we do routine maintenance on our servers, but in this case I just didn’t get to it in time!  Last night, for anyone who was awake in the wee hours of the day and tried to visit our site, we took our servers down for a bit to do some upgrading to our servers.  They’re all better now and should be running faster than ever!  Our apologies if you couldn’t get access last night.