Readers’ Favorite Posts

Top Ten Most-Read Posts of All Time from the J-M Blog (2006-present):

Cute Little Black Boys Do Grow Up To Be Black Men, PART II — And Now, They Are Ten This is, by far, our most viral post ever. It was posted the day after the Ferguson decision — November 25, 2014, and immediately went crazy-viral on Facebook. In the several days following its publication, this post received almost 200,000 hits, links, and “shares” and took us on a crazy whirlwind viral-blog-post roller-coaster ride for a little while.
Cute Little Black Boys Do Grow Up To Be Black Men This post got quite a bit of traction when it was first posted, but then got a lot more traction as the result of a link to it on post #1 above.
Great Chapter Books for Black Boys We continue to receive a steady little stream of emails from all over the U.S. about this post, especially from librarians and teachers who are using it as a resource for book purchasing in their schools, classrooms, and towns, and also from parents of black boys searching hard for books for their kids.
And You Wonder Why I Dress My Boys The Way I Do? This post was published when the Trayvon Martin tragedy was really hitting hard in the national media and in our hearts. This post went viral in the blogosphere and on Facebook and Twitter at that time, and has continued to get steady hits and links ever since.
Celebrating Adoption: The Family Tree Project This post has been by far our biggest “Pinterest” post! Tons of Pinterest pinning on this one. We also frequently get emails from teachers and educators about this post — as well as from adoptive parents — concerned about how to approach the classic “family tree” project with adopted kids in schools and families.
Food Friday: Strawberries and Cream Mini Muffins Interestingly enough, this is our most-clicked-upon food post ever!!! I made these muffins for Meera’s 3rd Birthday Party (the infamous “Fancy Pink Tea Party”!), then posted the recipe for a ‘Food Friday.’ And… somehow… this particular post really took off!
Things We Did This is a hard-core adoption/attachment post that has continually been referenced and referred to by many adoptive parents of kids from tough places. This is a post that we are very proud of. The follow-up to it is also extremely popular amongst adoptive family readers: Celebrating Adoption: Attachment Both Ways (and the “Things We Did” post).
The Trayvon Martin Verdict In the first 24 hours after the Trayvon Martin verdict came out, we got a lot of pressure from readers to publish a post with our thoughts on it. Many people were trying to grapple with how to wrap their minds around that verdict and wanted us to weigh in. This was the result of those requests.
H’s Swap: Feb 22, Asian Salad and Bread Pudding Interestingly enough, this is our 2nd-most-clicked-upon food post! So funny what really gets traction in the food-lovers world online! This post was done as part of “The Swap” (click here for info), and is the most popular post from all of our many ‘Swap’ posts. For a follow-up post on the Asian Salad recipe, there is this post too: Food Friday: Asian Noodle Salad and the J-M Post-Holiday Cleanse!
The Sociology of Gendered Masculinity: A Case Study of Two Young Boys This one just seems to stick somehow. It was published in 2011, and has rock-steady-consistently stayed in the top-10 most-hit-upon-posts since then.

Honorable Mention #1: Top Ten List: Potty Training Twins This is #11 on our blog stats ‘Most Read’ list. It is worth posting it here, though, because despite the fact that I wrote this in my first month of blogging, I still — to this day — regularly receive the most hysterical emails about this one from twin parents all over the place who are struggling with twin (especially boy-boy twin) potty training. Oh, how I’m happy those days are over for us! And oh, how I’m happy I posted about it when I did (so that I can laugh ’till I cry about it now!… back then… I was just crying!). This is a twinny post.
Honorable Mention #2: Life in the Fast Lane (AKA Our Triennial Crunch) This is #12 on our blog stats ‘Most Read’ list. This is worth posting here because it really speaks to dual-career working mama readers. Here’s another very popular post for the working mamas: On Princeton and Panties.
Honorable Mention #3: Meera’s 3rd Birthday Party: A Fancy Pink Tea Party By far more than any other post, this one is the post most talked-about with me in real life. People ask me about it, make fun of me for it, and flat-out tell me that they think I’m absolutely crazy for it, way more than any other post I’ve ever published!! Given how often people mention this post to me offline (and how many photos from it are pinned on Pinterest), I’m really surprised it isn’t in our Top Ten Most Viewed… not to mention Meera’s other birthdays!… Meera’s 1st, 2nd, Meera’s 4th Birthday (Tea and Bubbles!), Meera’s 5th Birthday (Fairy Forest!)… and The Big Bounce Birthday Bash of 2014 (where we combined all 3 bambinos’ birthdays into 1!)… and don’t even get started on K & O’s birthdays!… when they turned NINE, EIGHT, SEVEN, SIX, FIVE, FOUR, THREE. Thank God we weren’t blogging yet when K & O turned two… because that was the most embarrassingly-over-the-top birthday party of all! 😉

TEN MORE OF OUR READERS’ FAVORITES:

It is in the Stringing Together of Moments

On Moving To Campus: The Full and Inside Scoop -&- The Making of a Residential Fellow Apartment

Getting Young Kids to Eat Fruits & Veggies

Telling Our Family Story: A Family Forever II (with link to I)

Caring for Black Kids’ Black Hair (with link to our one and only Locs post)

In The Wake of the Earthquake -&- Earthquake Aftershocks

K & O Steal Baby Jesus

Field Notes from an Adoptive Mother: “Enjoying Your Summer?”

Lehigh’s Brown & White Newspaper Series on our Family: Part I, Part II, Part III

Regarding Southside Little League

During our first five years of blogging (2006 – 2011), we did an annual survey of our readers asking them to vote for their favorite posts from that year. Here are the results from each of those first five years in the blogosphere: