Mommy Poppins and the local weekend newsletters: what they do, and what they don't

The local weekend newsletters are good at what they do, which is telling parents what is on. What none of them does is tell you which day to do it. Here is what they cover, in their own words where we could read them, and how the two things fit together.

Updated 16 September 2026.

What the newsletters do

Mommy Poppins publishes email newsletters for parents in a long list of regions — its own page names New York City, Long Island, Westchester, New Jersey, Connecticut, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas Fort Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Miami and South Florida, Orlando, and an “Anywhere” edition — featuring, in its words, the best activities, travel, and local news for parents, with sends running several times a week and daily in New York (mommypoppins.com, read 16 September 2026). It is free to readers and paid for by advertisers, which is the usual arrangement and a perfectly good one.

Macaroni KID is the other name parents mention for local family newsletters. Its site would not open for us on the day we checked this page, so we will not describe it beyond that; if you have a local edition, you already know what it does.

Between them, and the dozens of city-level weekenders like them, they answer the question “what is happening this weekend” thoroughly. Events, festivals, story times, splash pads, the free day at the museum. If you want a list, they are the list.

What they don't

A newsletter lists Saturday's farm festival and Sunday's kite day and leaves you to work out which one to go to, and whether either day will be any good for it. It cannot know; it went to press on Thursday. So the family that reads it still checks the forecast, still argues about whether the clouds mean rain, and still occasionally spends the one lovely Saturday of the month indoors at the event that happened to be scheduled for Sunday.

That gap — which day — is the only thing Perfect Day does. It judges the coming weekend hour by hour against what a good day out with children needs and says, days ahead, “Saturday looks like the good one.” Then the newsletter tells you what to do with it.

Which day, this weekend, in 25 cities

To show the shape of it, here is the coming weekend judged for a day out with the kids, city by city, refreshed every few hours. The newsletters above cover most of these cities; this is the line they cannot print.

Checked 4:51 pm; next check about 7:51 pm.

Each city has its own page too, at /families.

Using both

1. Read the newsletter on Thursday, as you do. Note the two or three things you would actually go to.
2. Let the day decide. Perfect Day tells you Saturday or Sunday (or, some weeks, neither, and names the next good day instead).
3. Pick the event that falls on the good day. If nothing does, the good day is the park, which was probably the better plan anyway.

A newsletter is free and Perfect Day is $5 a year, so this is not an either/or. The newsletter is the what. This is the when.

Descriptions of other publications are taken from their own pages on the date stated; we recheck quarterly. Perfect Day makes this page.