Dating my son on Lombard Street (sponsored)

When Julian has a day off from school that Scarlett doesn’t have, I usually take him on a special date. We have done karaoke, gone to a kid’s art museum, seen a movie in San Francisco, and hit The Exploratorium. Recently we went to Lombard Street, the crookedest street in the world.  Lombard Street is depicted in a few books we have about San Francisco, which is about 25 minutes from our house. I let Julian (age 6) take all the pictures.

I mentioned a few months ago that I planned to start a Posterous site for him. We’ve been loving it. It’s his own website where we can forward pictures that his grandparents send us to show him and they are displayed as blog posts. He has added YouTube links to his favorite videos and my husband posted his soccer team roster there. You can post anything, like a regular blog, but also you can add a “post”, just by sending an email to a certain address. The site is private, so I don’t have to worry about him writing crazy posts as he tends to do and the whole world seeing them. For example, he wrote a recent post titled “My Dad’s Phone Number”. The text of the post? His dad’s phone number.

After our Lombard Street outing, during which he counted the steps alongside the street, he posted a tally of the stairs he counted:

Later, I uploaded one of his photos to the post.

Often other parents at school send me pictures of my kid as attachments. I know I’ll never remember to look at those emails again or to show them to Julian. Sometimes they’re so enormous, I can’t even see them on my screen properly. (Updated: Sadly Posterous has shut down since I posted this.) It’s dead simple for me to forward them to post@posterous.com. The subject line of the email becomes the post title and the photos show up in the body of the post. The images get resized automatically. Here’s one I received from the last day of school.

This post, as you may have guessed, is sponsored by Posterous. Anyone who is concerned about privacy and security of their photos might consider setting up an account for sharing kid photos. Also? If you don’t need all your former co-workers seeing your summer vacation/bathing suit pictures, this is a way to create an online record of your photos without opening them to your entire Facebook posse. Simply send them as attachments to emails addressed to post@posterous.com and they’ll be displayed as posts.

Check it out — there’s an iPhone app, too!