A good article on Mommy Blogs

I don’t think Stormy’s Corner is a 100% mommy blog but sometimes it’s more mommy blog than other times.  The Denver Post has a good article today about mommy blogs (and how much money they are making for some women.)  The opening paragraph had me laughing.  I definitely had that "nasty case of whiplash!"

Julie Marsh started blogging as she
recovered from a nasty case of the type of whiplash women often
experience after shifting at warp speed into motherhood.

A move to southeast-suburban Parker only a few weeks
before had compounded her malady. Her husband wanted to pursue a great
job opportunity. Her kids – a toddler and an infant – would love their
new fenced-in backyard.

Bye-bye, awesome job at a New York City music company,
Marsh thought. Hello, stay-at-home mommydom. Bye-bye bustling
neighborhood filled with friends, boutiques and coffee shops. Hello
chain restaurants, strip malls and driving, driving and more driving.

Fortunately, my blog didn’t make enough money for us to live off of.  I say fortunately because I don’t think sitting at home writing all day would be my favorite career … now if they write a blog post a day and make it … well, then, I need to work on my writing!

Too many good books …

In case you are wondering why I haven’t posted any book reviews lately … it’s because I have been getting so many good books that I’ve started lots of them and not finished any of them.  I’m currently reading:

So I’ll let you know how it goes.

Atheism on the rise?

A BBC article says that atheism, or maybe agnosticism, is on the rise in the US.  Surprisingly they gave 9/11 as a reason people maybe more likely to be agnostic since they see terrible acts committed "for my God."  They pointed at recent bestsellers as evidence of this growing atheism:

Note that there are three times more atheist in Europe that there are in the US.  Also, Christians are still clearly a majority in the United States.

Is homework good for kids?

 

Photo by Cayusa
Photo by Cayusa

The Truth about Homework clearly argues that homework is not good for kids – or at least that the cons of homework outway the pros.  I think I definitely learned more in the classroom than I did from any homework but I learned two things from homework:

  1. How to write papers.  We never wrote a whole research paper in school.  I can remember writing my first papers in sixth grade.  (I can also remember my mom telling me I could do much better – something the teacher never would have told me as I got A’s on them!  Mom was right of course.  The question was, did it matter?)
  2. How not to procrastinate.  When we moved to Spain when I was in 7th grade it would take me several hours a night to do my homework – mostly because I was struggling with the Spanish.  Carmen, our next door neighbor who watched us after school, would feed us a snack right after school and then we would all sit at the dining room table working on school work until we were done.  To this day, I am not a big procrastinator.  Just sit down and do it.  (And this is why I got to play pool and go out in college while my roommates slaved away!  Come home, go to your room where it’s quiet, do your homework, come out, say hi to everyone and then go to the pub while they sit around talking and doing homework.  I think we all did the same amount of socializing and homework but I think I felt less stressed.)

I also enjoyed doing my math homework and doing a lot of math problems probably cemented the how-to that I learned in school.  Other than that, I can’t remember getting a lot out of my homework but maybe my parents would have a different opinion …

Why do you blog? Do you care who Violent Acres is?

Blogs are like diaries but they are public.  They are obviously meant to be read, to be shared – otherwise why put them on the web, right?  That said, there are some blogs that make you wonder why people are writing that in public.  And I have to admit that lately there’s been a few times where I had to stop myself from writing something on my blog – something I was upset about, wanted to share, but probably shouldn’t share with the whole world.  (For example, imagine you are upset with something a colleague did or said at a meeting and it’s so Dilbertesque that you want to write about it.   I had second thoughts on the wisdom of writing about that …)  People that write blogs like that try very hard to keep them anonymous.

There are a couple of blogs that I follow that I’m not sure why I read them.  One of those is Violent Acres.  I feel like I’m reading someone’s diary and yet I enjoy reading it.  Some of the things she says are things people never say in public but make total sense to me.  Like why are women obsessed with being fat?  Or of course she’s writing for traffic not for herself, or she would have just written in her diary and stuffed it under her pillow.  So I can’t understand why this reader got so upset about it:

This is why I’m done reading Violent Acres:
“For the official record, though, of course I write for the traffic. If
I were ‘writing for myself,’ I’d type this shit up in microsoft word
and put it under my pillow. I’m here to entertain you. If I wasn’t
entertaining you, I’d likely stop writing…despite the fact that this
site does turn a profit.”

That absolutely sickens me. Some of the things that V wrote about
were very personal, tragic, and terrible. Very few people (me being one
of them) would understand what it is like to go through some of the
things that she wrote about. And now I found out that she wrote these
things for a profit? What am I to think about that? Were any of them
actually true? Did she embellish her stories to draw more people in? It
is my belief that anyone who writes for traffic can’t be trusted to
write honest content.

Basically, they no longer plan to read her blog because it was written for an audience!  Did they really believe that Violent Acres was writing a diary in public for herself with no regards to who read it??  They obviously wanted Violent Acres to keep up the charade.  (By the way there’s a lot of hoopla right now – people are trying to figure out who Violent Acres is.  I agree with the group that says "I don’t care."  It’s highly unlikely I know the person anyway … and I’m not really worried if her stories are 100% accurate or not.   I read them because I enjoy reading them.) 

Best infant costume

If Caleb was still crawling, this is what he’d be for Halloween. Since he’s walking, I have something else in mind and you will have to wait and see!