As much as we love getting out and enjoying all the fun indoor activities of NYC, when the temperatures are this cold it's also nice to spend a cozy day at home playing around the house. But cozy can go crazy very quickly if you are not well stocked with things to do. And the perfect thing to have on hand, especially for apartment dwellers, in my opinion, is activity books.

Here are my favorite boredom busting activity books for boys and girls. These also make terrific birthday party gifts or long distance travel sanity savers.

Note: Next week we will be offering a Poppins Perk to try out Off Your Desk to try at an incredibly low price.
While the politicians debate our health care crisis in Washington, every day, regular people have to struggle to try to get adequate health care without going broke. It is likely that everyone, at one time or another, has had a run in with their insurance company. From my personal experience I know that I will need to file most claims at least twice in order to get them processed correctly, whether because they were "lost" or denied or just some petty thing they can find to not file it, knowing that many people are too busy to follow up.

If cold, gray and slushy are the only words that come to mind when you think of Winter in NYC, then you have come to the right place. Just because the thermometer seems frozen below 32 degrees and you're too cold to think, there's no reason you can't still have fun.

Our Winter Fun Guide is a new guide for us and filled with the best things to do in New York City this winter from culture highlights to indoor and outdoor sports, winter day and weekend trips and other ways to have fun without the sun. We'll be adding more to this guide in the coming weeks and you can always find the latest winter news at the bottom of the guide. Make sure to check it whenever you need a little bit of frosty inspiration.

We've also updated our Indoor Activity Guide where you can find lots of places to get in from the cold, from play spaces to free indoor spots to hang out. There's no need to suffer from cabin fever.

Our Winter and Indoor Guides have everything you need to know to keep the good times rolling until Puxatawny Phil brings us warmer days.

I love lists. So neat, so handy, so easy to read. And I love sharing our lists with you. Sometimes I think I started Mommy Poppins, just so I could share my information organizing manias with other people. And list posts have been some of the most popular posts on Mommy Poppins. Of course, 100 Things to Do with Your Kids Before They Grow Up, my mega-list, is kind of the flagship post of the site, but we have had some other great lists too from where to get the best hot chocolate to what to do on a staycation. Here are my top ten list posts of 2010:

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:

The new year is a time of reflecting. Looking back on 2010 there are so many great discoveries we made that we'd like to share. This week, in addition to our regular posts, we'll be sharing some of our favorite websites and other stuff that we've enjoyed this year, starting with some of the great websites about living in New York City. These sites are great resources that often inspire me (when I have time to read them). You may want to book mark this post to check back with these cool blogs often.

We've had a great week of giveaways this week and made some very happy Holidays for a few folks. While there's still time to enter our giveaway for a $100 Best Buy Gift card (closing Thursday, December 23 at 10PM), today we're giving away 4 tickets to Cirque de Soleil's Wintuk.

Do you like to connect to the internet from wherever you are? Browse Facebook while waiting for the kids at Karate? Watch streaming video between meetings? New WiMAX-enabled laptops mean you can connect wherever you are at 4G speeds. To celebrate, Intel asked us to give away a $100 Best Buy gift cards and let you know how you can get another one too.