Category Archive

announcements

Offbeat Families won’t be publishing new posts, but our archive will stay online FOREVER (and we’ll still be on Facebook)

While we are ceasing daily publishing on Offbeat Families, the site and community will live on. Here’s how…

How we used silly string to reveal our baby’s sex

If you’ve heard of gender reveal parties, you probably know how they go — people usually use colored cake or balloons to reveal the sex of their baby to family and friends. When it came to our own baby, I wasn’t as interested in having an actual party as much as I wanted a fun way to find out the news. That’s right — we had our party without even knowing ahead of time if we were having a boy or a girl!

It’s official: Offbeat Mama is now Offbeat Families!

After months of deliberation and many hours of behind-the-scenes technical lever-pulling, button-pressing, server re-configuring, and graphic redesigning, we are officially relaunched under our new name: OFFBEAT FAMILIES!

This shift to our new name should NOT have any technical impact on readers, regardless of how you follow our posts…

Offbeat Mama turns ONE: what I’ve learned from 12 months of working on this website

So, Offbeat Mama launched exactly one year ago yesterday! WHEW. What an intense year of learning it’s been — of course Offbeat Mama is all tangled up in my own experience of my first year of being an offbeat mama (Tavi’s birthday is coming up in a couple months) but it’s still been a pretty twisty turny learning experience.

Here’s what I’ve learned from running this website:

Why I hate parenting acronyms and refuse to use them

Sometimes I feel like I am battling a one-woman war against the over-acronymification of women’s communities. This is something I’ve dealt with on the Offbeat Bride Tribe for years, but I think the acronyms in online parenting communities is even more intense.

Agreeing to disagree

When I first started thinking about Offbeat Mama last fall, the biggest issue for me was wanting to make sure that the site wasn’t dogmatic and was welcoming to folks from all sorts of backgrounds. Maybe it’s working?