Who's the Mummy?

February 2010 Tots100 Index of the UK's top 100 parent blogs

Welcome to the February 2010 Tots100 index of the UK's top 100 parent blogs and bloggers!

This month's index sees some pretty big changes - 16 new entries and some great moves up the table.

Looking at the figures, many of these changes are due to the enormous number of bloggers who were involved in the Bloggers for Haiti initiative, which created LOADS of new links and Tweets among Mummy and Daddy bloggers. These links were all in a good cause - raising money for the victims of the terrible earthquake in Haiti. If you haven't donated yet, you can do so here.

New Tots100 members, don't forget to get your blog badges by clicking on the link here.

If you’re not listed this month and you haven’t yet submitted your blog to Who’s the Mummy, please leave a comment on THIS post with your blog name, Twitter ID, and blog URL, and I’ll add you to the mix next time.

Right, let’s go!

The Top100 British Parent Blogs and Bloggers February 2010:

Rank	Blog	Score	Change
1	Alpha Mummy	888	=
2	A Modern Mother	873	=
3	Who's the Mummy?	869	+1
4	Sticky Fingers	859	+1
5	English Mum	853	+7
6	Are We Nearly There Yet, Mummy?	822	+3
7	Crystal Jigsaw	777	=
8	All That Comes With It	773	+2
9	Baby Baby	766	+21
10	More Than Just a Mother	764	+32
11	Little Mummy	745	+6
12	Notes From Inside my Head	730	+16
13	Noble Savage	714	+7
14	Bambino Goodies	712	-1
15	Diary of a Desperate Exmoor Woman	710	+12
16	Babyccino	706	+6
17	Metropolitan Mum	693	+20
18	Insomniac Mummy	690	+20
19	Living with Kids	689	+4
20	Wife in the North	687	+9
21	Millennium Housewife	670	-7
22	Single Parent Dad	668	-19
23	Violet Posy	660	-7
24	Not Supermum	647	+2
25	Rosie Scribble	646	+24
26	Nappy Valley Girl	637	+20
27	Motherhood the Final Frontier	621	-2
28	Maternal Tales from the South Coast	620	+6
29	Bringing up Charlie	619	+6
30	Nixd Minx	609	+2
31	Welcome to my World, Jan Mary	602	=
32	It's a Small World	597	+19
33	Kitschy Coo	585	+15
34	40 Not Out	577	+16
35	A Midwife's Muse	572	+14
36	Brits in Bosnia	568	-18
37	New Mummy	565	+24
38	Yummie Mammy	563	+19
39	Grits Day	553	-13
40	Hot Cross Mum	550	=
41	Working Mum on Verge	546	-6
42	Brit out of Water	543	+2
43	Frog Blog	542	+12
44	Sleep is for the Weak	541	+53
45	Babyrambles	538	NEW!
46	Potty Diaries	537	-35
47	Bedside Crow	532	-4
48	Wife of Bold	529	+6
49	Hairy Farmer Family	527	+20
50	Cotton Pickin' Days	525	+2
51	WAHM-BAM	522	-18
52	Notes from Lapland	520	NEW
53	Home Office Mum	514	+14
54	The Mad House	513	+24
55	Live Otherwise	513	+13
56	A Place of My Own	509	+8
57	Dulwich Divorcee	504	+31
58	If I Could Escape	490	-38
59	Being a Mummy	482	=
60	Beki's Bloggy Bits	476	NEW
61	Breastfeeding Mums' Blog	474	-39
62	Tattie Weasle	472	+9
63	The Smell of Little Pong	470	+25
64	The Babbling Mummy	470	-10
65	Four Down, Mum to Go	467	+9
66	Country Lite	465	NEW!
67	Really Rachel	462	+5
68	Patch of Puddles	460	-23
69	Mother at Large	438	-9
70	The Wood and the Trees	460	-23
71	Welsh Hills Again	423	-12
72	Flower Fairies and Fairy Cakes	422	NEW
73	Most Least	415	+26
74	Mom or Mum Wars	412	+7
75	Parentdish	410	+3
76	Daddacool	409	+25
77	A Confused Take That Fan	406	-1
78	A Mother's Ramblings	404	-37
79	The Bush Babies	402	+1
80	Family Friendly Working	400	+1
81	Diary of a Surprise Mum	393	-8
82	More to Life than Laundry	375	NEW
83	Poke in the Eye	373	NEW
84	Mrs Trefusis	372	NEW
85	Perfectly Happy Mum	366	+1
86	Some Mothers do 'ave em	364	NEW
87	Muddling Along Mummy	363	-5
88	Clinically Fed Up	354	NEW
89	And 1 More Means 4	351	NEW
90	Single and Surviving	342	NEW
91	Glowstars	341	NEW
92	Give me the Booger	340	NEW
93	Mummy Do That	339	-31
94	Playing by the Book	338	NEW
95	Cafe Bebe	337	NEW
96	Family Relationships	329	-17
97	Littlesheep Learning	328	-22
98	The Brinkster	328	-27
99	Don't Panic. RTFM.	306	NEW
100	Musings of a Juggling Mother	304	=

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday: planning ahead.

Clearly, Flea is a girl who likes to plan ahead. 

Today, she amused herself by writing her wish-list for Father Christmas...

Then she planned her birthday party.

Each face is someone she's going to invite. What are the X's? Well, I'm glad you asked. Those are the children she's already decided to uninvite. I think the power might have gone to her head. 

The Flea Files, Part II

When we first launched Who’s the Mummy last year, I interviewed Flea about all the things I thought our blog readers might want to know about us.

But Flea was three then. Now she’s four and in BIG SCHOOL. She’s a whole different person. So we re-did the interview (inspired by the lovely Rosie Scribble) and here it is, accompanied by a brand new illustration of Me and Flea. Just FYI, my hair still doesn't look like that. Well, not often.

Who’s in charge of the world?

Is it God from Mary and Joseph? No, wait a minute. It’s Father Christmas.

What does the Queen look like?

I don’t know, I’ve never met her. [Flea looks at me as though I’m a moron]

Where do babies come from?

Mummies’ tummies.

How do they get there?

Well, I don’t think you pop them in your mouth… I think you imagine them in your brain and then they go down to your tummy.

Who is Barack Obama?

I don’t know, but I think he comes from that place where you get the spiders that pinch you. It’s not a shop, but it’s a place and I don’t know the name of it.

If you could be anyone else, who would you be?

In Astro Boy there is a little boy robot and he drives a car and someone says, “Who’s driving the car?” and he says “I am” and they all say “ARGH!!” I would like to be him.

Who is your best friend?

You. Except if I am at school. Then it’s Max.

If you had children, what would their names be?

I think I will have five children: Harry, Thomas, Max, Thomas and Charlie. I will have two Thomases because I like them both. And I’ll have a kitten and call it Tom.

What do you think you’ll dream about tonight?

I might dream about cats. Actually, no, guess what? I’m going to dream about what I’m wearing tomorrow. It will be my Batman t-shirt, my trousers that I wore today and some clean knickers and my boy PE socks. Did you wash my knickers? I’m dreaming about that. Wait,  is it school tomorrow? Oh. Never mind then.

What makes you happy?

You, snuggling me.

What makes you cross?

When I press a button that doesn’t do anything. That’s what makes me cross.

What toy would you like if you could have anything?

A cat creature figure. Are you writing this down? Did you write that down? Let me see. Where is it? Oh, okay.

What will you be when you grow up?

A diver, because I want to have adventures under the sea.  Or a pirate. Divers wear flippers.

What’s the best thing about your school?

The adventure playground. I like it best when we do colouring. When you do some sounds you colour in the things that begin with the sounds.

And your least favourite thing?

Does that mean the thing you really, really like? I really, really like my pirate ship. Wait, what does it mean? Oh. I don’t know then. I like everything.

What’s five plus five?

Errrm. Four. I can do spelling good-er, though.

The Best Fifty Quid I Ever Spent

When Flea was about six weeks old, I  spent an evening in a draughty church hall in Brighton, with 11 other new parents and a registered nurse. Over a period of three hours, we were taught the basics of paediatric emergency first aid – what to do if your baby stops breathing, what if they choke, what if they fall down the stairs, get scalded.

The course was run by a company called Safety Angels, and each of us paid £50 to attend the workshop. Expensive, but given the number of times I’ve used the advice and techniques I learned there, I think it’s the best money I’ve ever spent.

Lots of the things I learned have been burned into my brain. The best way to see if a baby is unconscious is to tap the bottoms of their feet firmly and say their name loudly – even if they’re deeply asleep they should respond (I'm embarrassed to admit how often I did this to poor baby Flea to make sure she was still alive). To be effective, chest thrusts (below the nipples, upwards) need to be WAY harder than you'd imagine.

We learned practical techniques like how to hold a baby when it's choking (belly down, along your forearm, with the head lower than the bottom) as opposed to a child (kneel down with your arm across their upper belly, bend them forward and give them three sharp back blows, while encouraging them to cough). And always, always slice grapes lengthwise, not across.

I remember the nurse telling us that the single most common thing for children to choke to death on is grapes. They’re just the right shape to get stuck and the texture means that you can’t always remove them with first aid. The horrible thing about choking on grapes (along with hot dog sausages and marshmallows) is that by the time a doctor is able to remove the blockage, the child may have been starved of oxygen for long enough that they die a few days later, from brain damage.

I’ve always been amazed by how few parents seem to have this sort of knowledge. But I recently looked online for a refresher first aid course (now Flea’s older, I know some of the resuscitation techniques are different, for example) and I was shocked by how few and far between they seem to be.

The nearest course to me was in the evening, 50 miles away, and not for another three months. Oh, and it was aimed at professionals, so it cost over £200. The St John’s Ambulance apparently runs paediatric first aid courses, but the website didn’t list any courses anywhere North of Watford for the whole of 2010 last time I checked.

It makes me sad that it isn’t easier for parents to learn basic first aid. In many household accidents, knowing the basics could mean the difference between a child living and dying. So shouldn’t this sort of simple, practical life-saving knowledge be built into the ante-natal/post-natal routine?

In the meantime, there are some really great videos on the Red Cross website showing basic life-saving techniques for babies and children. I urge you to check them out - it's ten minutes out of your day, but one day it might make a real difference for someone in trouble.

New voices in my head.

I used to have a voice inside my head. She used to tell me that I wasn’t good enough - yet.

One more set of exams, one more rung on the career ladder, one more friend, a marriage certificate, a perfectly hung set of curtains on a Victorian bay window – get all of that, she used to say, and you might be good enough. After all, she whispered, your own mother didn’t want you. How could you possibly be good enough?

I probably spent 20 years listening to her. I spent 20 years chasing after all the things she said would make me good enough. And then I lost them all.  I lost the husband, I lost the friends, I lost the Victorian bay window. Then there was a recession and a baby, which pretty much took care of the career, too.

For a while, I was lost. I was falling, and I didn’t know how to stop. I hung on to the wrong things, the wrong friendships, the wrong priorities. I panicked in the wee small hours about how to get it all back. And the voice? Well, she always knew this would happen. 

Then, there came a point where I just… stopped. I took a deep breath, and looked around. I listened. And there was a new voice.

This voice said: “20 years is an awfully long time to try and live up to someone else’s  idea of good enough.” It said, “You’re already good enough. You always were.”

So, I have this new voice inside my head lately. He reminds me it doesn't matter if anyone else thinks I'm rich enough, smart enough, thin enough, young enough. He tells me to chase my own dreams, and let go of the dreams other people might have for me. He says that every day that I laugh, love my daughter, and try to make the path a little easier for someone else - then I'm good enough. We all are. 

This post written for Josie's writing workshop head on over to find out more!

So, basically, I'm pathetic.

At the moment, one of the greatest weapons in my parenting arsenal is the “no school” threat. Flea loves school so much that if she’s dawdling getting dressed or refusing to brush her teeth, all I have to say is, “Fine, we won’t go to school”.

So it was a bit weird when I woke Flea for school yesterday and she cried. Flea’s not a big cryer as a rule (if she thinks you’ve seen her crying, she pretends her eyes are itchy) so I was a little worried, and mentioned it to the teacher. I suspect Flea’s just really tired (she’s had red eyes and black shadows around them for the last week) but you never know, I guess.

At home time, the teacher called me to one side, and said Flea had indeed been a bit tearful during the day, and they were concerned because it’s so unlike her. The teacher wondered whether Flea was a little upset because there’s a new girl in the class, and perhaps Flea feels threatened that the little girl she sits next to might become friends with the new girl. There are only 10 kids in the class, so a new pupil is quite a big deal.

Flea hadn’t mentioned anything about this – but that’s not surprising since she tells me nothing about school at the best of times. Still, that night at bedtime, we were curled up on Flea’s bed after having a story and I decided this was the perfect moment to demonstrate another one of my amazing parenting techniques.

“You know Flea, sometimes if you’re friends with someone, and then they’re friends with someone else, it can feel a bit sad,” I said.

Flea looked at me with big eyes.

I decided to keep going. “So, you might be a bit worried that they won’t be your friend if they’re friends with someone else.” 

Still silence.

“Erm, so, you know, it’s okay to feel sad. But the important thing to remember is that you can be friends with lots of people at the same time, can’t you?”

My four-year-old daughter reached over and stroked my arm, sympathetically. “It’s okay Mummy,” she said. “I’ll be your friend if you haven’t got one any more.”

I’m being patronised by a four-year-old. My life is officially pathetic.

PostRank for the rest of us.

Mel, the very helpful community manager at PostRank has pulled together all the Tots100 feeds into a list, which I linked to today on Twitter.

Following LOTS of questions about what this list is, why people are higher or lower or where they expect to be, and that sort of thing, I’ve been asked to a brief primer. This is just a quick post (school run in 5 minutes!) but it might explain what that list is, and why I think it's the best thing ever.

Q: What is it?
A: PostRank is a service that monitors blog feeds for something called ‘engagement’. Briefly, this is geek-speak for how involved your audience is with your blog – do they comment, do they share links to your content on Twitter or Facebook, do they submit your posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg or Del.ici.ous.

Q: Who cares about engagement?
A: Basically, PostRank sells a premium version of its data to people like PR agencies, marketers and online companies. They’re the sort of people that don’t just want to know whether lots of people read a blog; they want to know whether those people are MOVED enough to interact with the content in some way. A blog that has higher levels of interaction is generally seen as more valuable, or successful than one which doesn’t.

Q: Do I need to sign up?
A: No. PostRank automatically adds new blogs to its service as it finds them. a few blogs in the Tots100 were missing, but Mel from the company has now added all of the necessary feeds for the index to PostRank. Signing up, creating a profile, following people is only necessary if you want to use PostRank to analyse blog feeds or buy PostRank services. Otherwise, don’t worry about it. If you're not in the Tots100, you can submit a URL without signing up to the service - just enter the URL of your blog and if you get a "not found" message, there's a box to say "Tell us about this URL".

Q: How are those scores calculated?

A: PostRank looks at every blog individually. It will look at your posts each week and consider, relative to your blog as a whole, how engaged was your audience this week. It then assigns each post a score from 0 to 10. So if your blog typically gets one or two comments per post, but you post something this week that gets 40 comments and 6 Twitter mentions, there’s a good chance that post would score 10 points. If it’s an average post, it might score 5 points.

Q: How come I scored 1st/10th/50th?

A: The crucial difference is that the ‘thematic’ score you get in PostRank doesn’t compare your blog to anyone else’s. It’s just saying, compared to your blog’s average performance, this is how a particular post did, or how your blog did over a week.

So, let’s imagine Blog #1 scored an average 10 this week for his blog posts while Blog #2 scored an average of 7. This doesn’t mean Blog 1 is more engaging than Blog 2. It just means that, relative to each of their blogs’ typical performance, Blog 1 was more engaging than usual when compared to Blog 2. It’s a relative, not an absolute value.

Q: How is this different to the Tots100?

A: The Tots100 uses lots of different metrics to arrive at a score for each blog. That’s because engagement is just one part of the story – we also look at the number of  subscribers and links to a blog, for example, which aren’t measured by services like PostRank.

We do use PostRank as one of the metrics but we don’t use the relative, thematic scores as that would be largely meaningless for our purposes. We use the absolute values that underline each score. So we can use PostRank to say, “Okay, Tim scored 10 for this post, but what does that 10 mean? How many mentions did the post actually get? How many Tweets?” We then add up all the absolute points for each post over the month and average them to give a score that can be fairly compared between blogs.

Q: So does PostRank matter?

It doesn't matter. For the vast majority of bloggers, no blog stats truly 'matter'. But if you're interesting in maximising your audience or audience participation, it's always useful to understand what content really strikes a chord with your readers. With PostRank you can easily see by looking at scores, which posts are most likely to resonate. But also, if you can see you are getting all your engagement points from Twitter but nothing from Facebook, is there a way to make it easier for people to share your content on Facebook? Do you need to make it easier for people to add content to Digg? Is your engagement generally increasing or decreasing over time?

This is information that many, many bloggers won’t care about – and there’s no particular reason to worry. But if you are looking to monetise a blog (and Lord knows, there’s nothing wrong with that even if we are officially no longer in a recession) then understanding your audience better is generally a good thing.

Hope that helps!

Some people just take it that bit too far, don't they?

I want to be in a reception class.

Last term, Flea enjoyed a Spanish day where she went to school and ate Spanish food. How cool is that?

She also learned about Spanish culture and can now count to 10 in Spanish. At least, I assume she’s counting – I don’t speak Spanish. She could be cursing my lack of parenting skills, for all I know.

Anyway, this week, the class is having a French day. Since Flea’s favourite things in life include croissants and brioche, she’s pretty excited. What’s more, she doesn’t have to wear her uniform – instead, she’s to wear either something French, or something in the colours of the French flag.

After an hour of trying to argue with Flea that the French flag isn’t black so she can’t wear her Darth Vader t-shirt, we agreed that she could wear her blue jeans and her red and white stripy pirate t-shirt to school on Wednesday, with her red, racing car trainers. Settled.

Or so I imagined.

This Saturday we were at a party for one of Flea’s school friends and I was chatting with a couple of the other parents. “All set for Wednesday?” Mrs S asked me, brightly.

“What?” It’s responses like this that make me such a hit at the school gate, I think.

“French day, silly! All set?”

“Oh right.” I tell Mrs S about Flea’s outfit, enjoying a little glow of pride that – for once – I’ve planned a school activity in advance. This is real progress considering I sent Flea to Harvest Festival carrying a cereal bar I found in the car’s glove compartment.

“How lovely,” smiled Mrs H. “I’ve got Thomas a Musketeer outfit. There’s a costume shop in [nearby town] that’s selling them; they’re only £15.”

“Great,” I managed to choke out.

I didn’t think about it any more until we were in the car on the way home, and a little voice in the back of the car piped up: “Mummy, you’ll never guess what! Thomas isn’t wearing a t-shirt to school on Wednesday, he’s going to be a muppeteer with a SWORD. Please may I be a Muppeteer, too?”

Great. Anyone know any French muppets that use swords?

Shiny, happy things.

The lovely Sian at Mummytips has fixed her blog (thank God!) and tagged me with the Shiny Happy meme.

The rules of the meme are that I have to choose a picture and a song that encapsulate happiness for me – something I listen to or look at when I need an immediate injection of happy in my day.

Annoyingly, Sian’s nabbed my idea of using a Smiths track, although with hindsight, I’m not sure what it says about me that I can’t sing, “And if a double-decker bus, crashes into us…” without feeling just a little bit better about the world.

So, I thought a bit more. And I do have a song that I literally can’t listen to without smiling. I have it on my “HAPPY” iPod playlist, and if this song starts playing on the car CD, Flea instantly pipes up: “Remember the rule Mummy. Only three times then you have to play something else.” (I instigated this rule after spending a seven-hour drive to Devon listening to nothing but All American Rejects).

Anyway, before I share the song with you, here’s why I love it so much: 

1. The original version of this track reminds me of some spectacularly happy moments in my life. Jumping up and down like a fool as a 17-year-old at the Reading festival. Going to indie clubs with my friends from college. Driving a Greenpeace van in Toronto with the Pixies on the stereo, all of us singing along at the tops of our voices. Just perfect.
2. The cover takes a song I already adored, and just turns it into 2 minutes 45 of musical joy. This version encourages – nay, demands – comedy dancing. This song is the best comedy dance song ever. Fact.
3. I even love the video taken of this performance – Meaghan Smith and her Peeps are just having so much fun! Who wouldn’t want to stand on a rooftop in the LA hills and play bongo drums? (the bongo guy is my favourite thing about this video).

So here it is for you all to enjoy: Meaghan Smith and the Peeps covering the Pixie’s Here Comes Your Man. Genius.

(ps I know the picture above is not big OR clever. But for some reason, I’m physically unable to look at it and not laugh. Bad Sally.)

God, I hate when kids play up in public, don't you?

Flea and I tend to get a lot of funny looks in the local supermarket.

Before you jump to conclusions, I think it’s because we play games.

One of our favourite games is where I get a bit of a head-start on Flea and then I try to run away from her shouting, “Stop following me, I’ve never seen you before in my life! Who are you, weird girl?” and Flea shouts, “You’re my Mummy, you’re my Mummy!”

I know this sounds like borderline abuse, but Flea loves it. When she catches me, she begs me to do it again, and if I miss any of our usual lines, she reminds me. “No, Mummy, you have to tell me to stop hanging on to your leg now then tell me to go and find my real parents!” The guy at the meat counter is used to me ordering sausages with a small schoolgirl wrapped around my ankle.

Flea’s favourite trick in return is to use her very best serious voice, and ask me to put my arms up. I pretend I don’t know what’s coming and put my arms up. She then shouts “SUCKER” and tickles me, before laughing like a hyena. Seriously, this trick makes anyone under five fall about. Try it.

Sometimes we have a “Yeah, but can you make THIS noise?” or "What about THIS face?" competition (see photo), which Flea always wins because she can make truly revolting noises and her face is weirdly flexible.

I feel a wee bit guilty, though. When I go to the supermarket, I often get sympathetic and supportive looks from other parents. “Oh, the things we do to entertain the kids, eh?” they seem to say.

I do a vaguely embarrassed, “Tsk, I know, kids, what can you do, eh?” face and pretend it’s me humouring Flea when it’s more like the other way round. Honestly, she's going to be absolutely mortified by me in a few years. Especially once I teach her the Coo-ee game. (It's a brilliant game that involves shouting COO-EEE! and waving at a stranger across the street. You score a point for everyone who looks a bit embarrassed and waves just in case they've met you but have forgotten who you are).

I’ve decided that having a blanket excuse to be silly in public is one of my very favourite things about being a Mum.