This page explains exactly how reviews on this site are researched, written and funded. If you ever want to know why an entry says what it says, the answer should be here. If it isn’t, ask me and I’ll add it.
How I choose where to go
Most of the time I’m just living my life — these are places my family already needed to visit. Some come from other moms telling me where they actually go. Some come from business owners using the request form. I visit a small fraction of what gets requested, and I choose based on whether I think other parents would find it useful, not on who asked first or asked loudest.
I pay my own way
I buy my own meals, book my own appointments, and pay for my own classes. No business is told in advance that I’m coming. If a visit is ever comped, gifted or sponsored in any form, that fact is printed in a labelled box at the very top of the entry, before anything else. There is no arrangement under which a business can pay for a review or pay to change one.
What happens when a visit goes badly
I don’t publish takedowns. If something falls short, I contact the owner or manager directly, tell them plainly what happened, and give them a chance to respond. Usually that’s the end of it — and honestly, that’s the outcome I want. A small business having a bad week doesn’t need a permanent public record of it.
This means something important that I want stated plainly: the reviews on this site are a filtered sample. They skew positive by design, because the negative experiences mostly become private emails instead of posts. Please read them that way. If you’re comparing two places and only one is written up here, that is not evidence about the other one.
What a missing review means
Nothing. There are hundreds of good businesses in this area I simply haven’t gotten to. Absence from this site is not a verdict.
Why every entry is dated
A restaurant with a wonderful server in March may not have that server in November. Management changes, menus change, a great pediatric practice gets bought out. Every entry carries the exact date and time I was there so you can weigh it accordingly. When I go back, I write a new entry rather than quietly editing the old one.
Entries written by other moms
Some entries on this site were written by other mothers about their own visits, in their own towns. Those are labelled at the bottom of the entry with the writer’s first name and city, and they carry a note making clear that I did not visit the place myself.
Every contributor confirms, before anything is submitted, that she went herself, paid her own way, has no financial relationship with the business, and was not asked or paid by anyone to write it. I read every submission, edit it for length and clarity, and send the edited version back before it runs. Nothing is published automatically.
Here is the honest limit of that: I can verify that a contributor made those promises. I cannot verify that she kept them. I have not stood in those rooms. Weigh a contributed entry as you would a recommendation from a friend of a friend — worth having, but not the same as having been there yourself. Where an entry is my own visit, it says so, and that is the stronger claim.
Contributors are never paid, and nobody can pay to have an entry published.
Corrections
If I get something wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it, and I’ll note at the bottom of the entry that it was corrected and when. I won’t silently change a claim.
Who writes this
One person: a mom of two who lives here. I write under the name Mom Buzz rather than my legal name, mostly so that the businesses I visit treat me exactly like they’d treat any other customer walking in the door. That anonymity is the point — the moment a review visit becomes a known review visit, it stops being useful to you.