Favorite Mom Blogs That Inspired Me 2010

1/5/11 - By Anna Fader

I am halfway through this week of "Best Of 2010" lists and and I'm starting to think I might not be cut out for this type of thing. It's hard to pick some blogs knowing you are leaving so many others out. To make matters worse, my innocent little list of the Best Local NYC Blogs got linked from the NY Times, so now my choices are forever part of the blog of record.

So before I jump into my list of my favorite Mom Blogs, I'd like to make a little speech about how I am choosing. (clear throat, tap fork on glass). The blogs I am including are blogs that inspire me, each in their own way. They are also the blogs that I happened to have thought of during the few hour window that I wrote this post. Tomorrow different things will be on my mind and I will find new sources of inspiration (and remember old ones that I didn't think of when I was writing this and apologize in my head to people I left off the list). But I hope that this post will be a source for you to find some new inspiration too, with some great blogs that maybe you didn't know about yesterday.

10 Favorite Mom Blogs that Inspired Me in 2010:

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Best for Making You Feel Like an Inadequate Mom, but Inspiring You to Try Harder: Jodi, a Brooklyn mom who blogs at Pistols and Popcorn has a knack for seeing the romance and beauty in every day she spends with her son, Roan—and now his two infant twin brothers, but unlike some sappy mom blogs she writes with such humor and spirit that following along with their adventures is like going to Coney Island every day, and she'll make you want to jump on the metaphorical train and head out there too.

Best For Making Life More Beautiful: If there is one person that lives up to the phrase "I don't know how she does it;" it is Gabrielle Blair of DesignMom. The woman has 6 (that's SIX!) children, works, was a founder of the social media site Kirtsy, and then blogs about all these amazing, beautiful things she does with her family. I'm sure there's some sort of deep dark secret that we just haven't discovered about Gabby, but I don't know what it is. In the meantime, I just have to ogle her blog and eat up the delicious images, wonderful, tasteful ideas and be inspired by the creative projects she does with her kids (oh, and enter her super giveaways!)

Best for a Good Cerebral Laugh:  Liz from Mom-101 isn't a clown for you. Yes, she makes you laugh out loud at her posts, but they are often also instructive, warning, or revelatory too. Kind of a laugh, followed by an "aha!" moment.

Best for Making You Laugh Until you Wet Yourself (which is much easier for us moms): There are a LOT of really funny mom blogs out there, so I will say right off the bat that my current love affair with Finslippy is decidedly arbitrary, but, damn, does this chick make me laugh. Let's start out with her upcoming book "Let's Panic About Babies!" which pretty much gives you an idea of the type of wry humor you will find smeared all over the pages of her blog.

Best for Getting Through the Baby Years: The thing I love about the Rookie Moms is that when you click over to their blog, or read their book, it's like someone has just taken you by the hand and invited you into their house, poured you a cup of tea and had a nice chat. It is a site all about getting through those first tough years with a baby, day by day, and the Rookie Moms blog is the perfect prescription.

Best for Yankee Know-How: ParentHacks is a site where moms and dads share their useful little tips to make parenting easier, cheaper and smarter. It's truly amazing the breadth of ideas that funnel through the site on a daily basis. Drop in to see what brilliant ideas are being shared that day or search the archives for a solution to your specific problem.

Best for Special Needs (meaning everyone): Love that Max is a wonderful blog about one woman's journey with her son who has cerebral palsy, but what I love about this blog is that it is really just another universal story of motherhood. I think that pretty much all kids have special needs and we all hit roadblocks with our children that can make our lives come to a halt that we must puzzle and crawl our way through. Reading about the lives of Ellen and Max reminds me of all the struggles and triumphs we go through as I celebrate their struggles and triumphs with them.

Best for Inspiring Me To Look For Inspiration: I actually have to credit this whole theme somewhat to Tina from Swiss Miss because she is the one who so firmly planted the idea of daily inspiration in my brain. And her blog does just that. Every day she posts little snippets of inspiration. Technically it's not a mom blog, I guess, but more of a design blog, but since she is a mom (Brooklyn, 2 kids) she often includes wonderful kids stuff.

Best for Getting in a Fighting Spirit: To be honest, I can't spend too much time on Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids site. It makes me too agitated and mad, because I believe her plight to reverse the trend of helicopter parenting is an important one, but reading over and over again stories of parents being ridiculed for letting their kids go outside alone (gasp) or how our culture is stifling and overprotective in general, kind of drives me crazy. But her blog inspires me to remember that we all have a responsibility to stand up for what we believe in and it is people like Lenore that inspired me to start Poppins Perks and try to make a difference in my own way.

I don't know how good you are at counting, but you might have noticed that that's only 9 blogs. See the problem is: 1. I can't possibly just pick one more blog to include and exclude so many others. 2. I can't think of any more clever categories. 3. It's freaking 1:30 in the morning and I'm tired.

So here are a few more great blogs that are on the top of my sleep deprived mind, but I invite you to add your favorite ones in the comments. Even I could use some new inspiration. I've particularly enjoyed these blogs this year: Alphamom, MomTrends, Happiness Project, Motherhood in NYC, Married My Sugar Daddy, even if they don't have their own clever categories.