Small Space Living

The response to yesterday's Via Toy Box giveaway was great and the winner of the Via Toy box is...MB Burns. Congratulations. We are all jealous! Thank you everyone who spread the word and entered the contest. And, don't fret, today I've got a slew of great prizes to giveaway.

The first prize is, I think, one of the best new baby product designs of the year. The Kaboost Chair Booster is beautiful, functional and an ingenious new solution to dining with children. It's another product that is great for families in the city because it helps apartments looking stylish and grown-up while still functioning as kid places. The Kaboost Chair Booster turns any ordinary chair into a high chair by boosting the whole chair rather than just the seat. It is also foldable and portable (and storable) other great qualities that city parents need in products. You can see my original write-up of the Kaboost Portable Chair Booster here. One lucky winner will get a free Kaboost.

But there's more...

Today is the first day of the Mommy Poppins week-long giveaway-a-thon. I've rounded up some of my favorite products and some great new discoveries to give away to readers this week. There will be awesome toys, beautiful pottery, a little something for new moms, and the ultimate dream - two weeks of meals prepared in your home by professional chefs.

I put together this giveaway-a-thon to celebrate the coming of the close of the first year of Mommy Poppins. It's been amazing to watch the site grow this year and I wanted to thank all my readers for all you've done to help out; from your ideas, words of encouragement, feedback and spreading the word about the site to your friends.

Today's great prize is my favorite toy box/storage solution for kids - Via Toy Box. I absolutely love this product because it makes cleaning up and organizing kids toys easy. Great storage is the secret to successfully living with kids in city apartments. You have to have storage that gets everything hidden, yet accessible and looks great because kids and grown up areas are often not as separated as they are in larger homes.

There are certain products that come out that almost make me wish I had a baby again so that I could use them (A couple of minutes of thinking about a sweet baby quickly turn to the reality and I become sane again). The Kaboost portable chair booster is one of them. This cool, new, ingeniously-designed booster seat alternative would not only have made my life a lot easier with my booster seat refusing son, but is just a neat looking piece of furniture.

New York can be an overwhelming place. Once you have kids the overwhelmingness multiplies exponentially. This site aims to make NYC with kids more manageable, interesting and fun, but there are loads of other resources out there too. We've dug up some of the best books for living in NYC with kids, covering schools, activities, apartment living, neighborhoods and more.

Kids love pets. Especially furry ones. Double especially big, furry, drool-y, ones that need to be walked and run and scooped up after several times a day and kenneled when you go on vacation and given expensive shots. Except they don't like all that stuff so much.

And the whining and begging and pointing out of cute dogs can wear a parent down to the point where maybe having a cute little doggie doesn't seem like such a bad idea, even if you do live in NYC in an apartment the size of a toothbrush holder and work 60 hours a day to pay for it. Which can lead to post traumatic pet ownership.

But, dogs are forever. You can't just get a cute puppy and keep it for a little while and then return it when the charm wears off...or can you? Urban travel guide, Gridskipper, reports on a new service that has come to NYC that may be the final answer to that perennial question, "Mommy, can I have a puppy?"

I actually just saw this cool toy storage advertised on Daddy Types and thought it was so great I had to write about it.

I don't know about you, but I hate putting things away. I like my apartment to be neat, but I also like to everything to be out enough so that I don't forget about it. To me the ideal way to clean up would be to just be able to toss everything into some cool looking piece of furniture that allowed me to organize the items by kind and also let me see what's in there. Clear plastic drawers or bins will do the job, but not nearly as nicely as these Via Toy Box units.

This is the perfect Valentine's Day post because Mommy Poppins LOVES the wonderful design site, Apartment Therapy. And now they've created a site all about kid design called The Nursery, so we actually have an excuse to link to them here. Check it out for a daily dose of eye candy.

After sex and money and kids the thing most couples fight about is chores. Chores. It doesn't seem to have the emotional baggage that the others do, so what's the deal? Apparently, it's about respect (I read that somewhere). If the other person isn't taking enough care about the house we share, it feels like a lack of respect and appreciation for the other person. If you put it that way, it does seem like a pretty important part of a healthy relationship.

So, after smoldering all day about my husband not helping out as much as I wished he did, I decided that I wouldn't get mad, I'd get even. That's where the Taskmaster came in. No, it's not a torture device, it's a form to help you divide the household chores evenly.