About Tumbleweeds

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About Tumbleweeds

Tumbleweeds was born in the summer of 1995. More accurately, it morphed.

In 1991, just as her son was about to enter preschool, Santa Fe mom and writer Claudette E. Sutton created The Tot’s Hot News, a quarterly newsletter for parents of children birth through kindergarten. Struck by the challenge of finding activities and services for families in Santa Fe, she drew on her own journalism background and love of children to create a newsletter chock-full of events, resources and articles on local people and organizations.

With her own son’s growth nudging her, Sutton revamped Tot’s Hot in 1995 into Tumbleweeds, a newspaper for families with children of all ages. For 25 years it has continued to grow, more than doubling in page count and circulation, expanding to the web and social media -- and picking up state and national awards for writing, editing and design.

And now in the summer of 2020, Tumbleweeds is making the great digital leap, providing our first fully online issue to adapt to the new realities of the coronavirus and the reading habits of young moms and dads.

What has stayed the same? Each quarterly issue still contains timely, informational articles and personal essays about children and families; a day-by-day calendar of events; seasonal directories of summer camps, school break camps and after-school programs, kids’ writing and artwork, craft projects and more.

Tumbleweeds is still edited and published by Claudette Sutton, who still believes that children are not just our future but a precious and vital part of the present. Our goal is still to produce a publication that support families, schools and communities in which children grow and thrive.

And the little boy who motivated it? Now a financial analyst living here in Santa Fe, after years of international travel, and still the light of his parents’ lives.

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