Last month’s Carnival of Gentle Discipline was such a success!  Our participants and readers generated so many great ideas for parenting in an unconditional and gentle manner.  I’ve been thinking of ways to keep the momentum going and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I am reluctant to make it a monthly event for two reasons.  1.  It is really time consuming (although we wouldn’t have to do a week-long event) and 2. I don’t want to interfere with the other Carnivals.  I realize that the same pool of bloggers are also often participants in the Carnival of Natural Parenting, the API Speaks Attachment Parenting Carnival, and others.  Since those are much broader in scope and can also include gentle discipline topics I don’t want to duplicate efforts.  I also don’t want the Carnival to become a “To Do” on anyone’s list that stresses them out (including me!) as just another monthly carnival with a deadline.

So, here are my thoughts.  I want to reserve each April (for Child Abuse Prevention Month in the US) and October (for Child Abuse Prevention Month in Canada¹) as the big Carnival months.  Each April and October I’ll host a week-long blogging extravaganza of gentle discipline (perhaps in conjunction with some other bloggers).  Then each month I’ll do a Gentle Discipline Fair² where I round up all of that month’s great gentle discipline posts.  It will be more passive, as I’ll be personally scouring the blogsphere for articles, but also participatory in that I’ll accept submissions here for self-nominated and other-nominated posts.  Then, instead of posting on a certain day and including lots of code for each entry – I’ll send out an “Award” similar to the Carnival of Gentle Disicipline Creme de la Creme badge that can be included on that month’s posts.

My thought was that this allows us to continue spreading the word as we began in April, collecting the best of the best in gentle discipline blogging, and award wonderful writers; but in a less time-intensive way which will in turn serve to make April and October that much more festive!

What are your thoughts?  I’d love to hear from you – lurkers and readers too! – about how you’d like to see the mission for gentle discipline continue!