The Yahoo! Groups - Still the best thing about PSP
Most people on the Park Slope Parents list choose to receive their posts in digest form. This means that instead of having a hundred emails in their inbox, they will only have four. Me? I’m old school. I like to get them individually.
It’s not so much that I like all the mail. If PSP went away tomorrow, I know I could still amuse myself with letters from Nigerian con men and they mysterious Bettylou Gallo who keeps trying to send me viruses. It’s not just that I enjoy reading and responding to posts, thought I do.
I actually enjoy the subject lines. I was particularly taken with the title of the thread, “Baby Changing in NYC”. It conjured up images of clandestine markets with people in dark glasses exchanging babies or the baby changers hanging around outside the Temple. This is not to take away from the importance and usefulness of the discussion contained within it. Changing one’s baby, even assuming it’s only their diapers can be tough on the go. There aren’t always changing tables and no one with a nose appreciates a public change in close quarters.
My own solution to this problem involved never going anywhere. But it turns out there are better solutions. There is now actually an App for this from IkidNY. It locates kid-friendly restaurants, changing tables and playgrounds. It’s good but I confess feel a bit melancholy about it, like someone who got their legs amputated just prior to the invention of roller skates or like my dad who, while terminally ill joked that his only regret was that he would not live long enough to see the launch of the iPhone. He was a Mac man through and through. But I’m straying off topic.
Another post that caught my eye was” Poop Retention”. Not a bad name for the problem that dare not speak its name, I thought. It sounds vaguely corporate as if there could be a department of it somewhere sending out memos. For what it’s worth, those memos would be about Miralax, probiotics, prune juice and lipids. In case you are wondering, there is no App for this.
Finally, in a slightly military vein there was a post entitled “Stroller Containment”. At first I thought this might be about the new stroller containment area in the Barnes and Noble or a review of the book, New Strategies for Stroller Containment. It turns out there is no such book, though Two Boots is surely in need of it. It was also not about containing children in strollers. (I solved this problem with duct tape) In fact it was about keeping strollers neat in the lobby. That’s good too.
I am past the time when many of these topics apply directly to my own situation but it’s nice to think other people are finding better, more sane solutions than what I came up with a few years back. It’s also nice to know that when I do run out of creative solutions, there’s someplace I can go to find answers and have a laugh in the process.
