In an age when anyone with kids and Internet access can take to the blogosphere and proclaim himself or herself a parenting expert, Brooklyn-based blogger Jenna Park offers something unique. Her Sweet Fine Day blog chronicles the day-to-day life of a mother who’s performing the great juggling act of running a baking business and raising two daughters, and of a woman who loves living in New York.
“What I write, it’s a personal reflection. I don’t set out to inspire anyone,” Park says. “If I’m relatable, because I do tend to speak my mind, that’s a great result.”
Park started Sweet Fine Day in 2008 when she and her husband, Mark, were launching their handmade sweets business, Whimsy & Spice. At the time, Park was already an experienced blogger. She’d founded a webzine where she wrote about food and pop culture for Asian Americans in NYC, blogged for the technology review site Popgadget, and later founded what was known as Babygadget, for which she reviewed new baby products. As a web-savvy writer, Park believed that her family’s new business needed an online marketing push.
Five years later, Sweet Fine Day is less about the business’s confections and more about living and parenting in New York—though readers are still treated to baked goods photo ecstasy on a regular basis. Whether she’s recounting her family’s recent trip to the MoMA, reflecting on her Korean culture—Park was 3 years old when she immigrated to the U.S. from Korea—or her position as the family breadwinner, or declaring Rockefeller Center as the New York epicenter of hell during the holidays, this mom’s writing is refreshingly unadorned and honest.
Beyond the resonance of her writing, Park’s photo essays are flush with emotion. She’s the mom of biracial children—her kids are 1/2 Korean, 1/4 Russian, 1/8 Norwegian, and 1/8 Italian—and one of her photo essays showcases other multiracial families. In another, she captures the quiet beauty of the snow-covered city while as she makes her way to the doctor’s office.
The inescapable backdrop of Sweet Fine Day is New York City, the home that Park has grown to appreciate even more since having children. “It’s just become a really good place to raise your kids,” she says. “It’s sort of easy to just stay in your little neighborhood and [my family is] guilty of that, too. But…there’s so much we should take advantage of while the kids are young.”
Visit sweetfineday.com. To read about more local Moms We Love featured this year, click here.
