apps for parents

Summertime is the perfect time for the kids and I to explore nearby Boston--hey, we need to do that Freedom Trail someday, right?--but, oy, do I hate driving around looking for parking. So, when a well-traveled friend told me that she'd …

If you're like me, you try a bunch of lipsticks out on your hand, then think you find the right one only to realize it's totally not your color. Well, that's all about to change thanks to the new free Urban Decay Vice Lipstick app which …

If there is one gift I could give to all new parents, it would be the ability to make their baby fall right asleep on command. But since my super powers were never really strong in that area, I'll have to settle with telling you about a …

Mis Amigos! One of our favorite early-reading apps, Endless Reader , has gone espagñol with the Endless Spanish app , an adorably playful and educational preschool app for both iOS and Android users. Similar to the awesome Endless Reader…

Summer nights are perfect for staying up late, lying on the lawn (or roof deck if you're a city dweller) and looking up at the stars. But, often, streetlights and other ambient light can make it hard to see everything that is up there cl…

If you're into taking video, have I got a reco for you! It's AfterCam , a sort of "after-the-fact" video recorder that helps you capture the past 5, 10, or 20 seconds in time without clogging up your phone with tons of extra video data. …

With all the time I spend outside of the house waiting for my kids to finish a class or practice, I'm always trying to find something new to do on my phone. You know, other than continually refreshing my Facebook feed or checking to see …

Like most people, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't Google some information, whether it's five times or 25 times. (Okay, sometimes 25 times an hour.) So you can imagine my excitement when the Gboard app rolled out a couple days…

With the school year ending soon, I know that my kids aren't going to stand for games or apps that feel too much like a school lesson. Nor do I want them to spend their summer days doing nothing but memorizing math facts. But after playi…

I have fallen into a dinner rut, relying on a few tried-and-true recipes that I can whip up before the kids get too peckish at the end of a busy day. But now that I've download the free and gorgeously designed Yummly app , which is avail…

If you're hoping to get your future mathlete ready for preschool in the fall, or just want to find a new ways to help practice counting, adding, and subtracting with your first grader, download the free version of King of Math Junior . T…

It's Sunday morning and your kids' friends just had to cancel their afternoon playdate. Or, you are on vacation with your toddler, and rain has just ruined your plans to visit that cool new park you read about online. What to do? Well, n…

In this week's Spawned podcast, our editor Liz's Cool Pick of the Week is Brain Pop, a website I have turned to for years with my homeschooled kids to find smart, kid-friendly videos about topics as diverse as William Shakespeare, the Ci…

Let's be honest, the best photos of kids are never the perfect ones. They're not necessarily the photos that required hours of prep time picking out a perfect outfit, or a six-lollipop bribe for a smile. Looking back at our own favorite …

If you haven't yet heard about the brand new feature from the Waze app called Waze Planned Drives , then you might be as excited as I am. Especially if, like me, if you're the kind of person who had kids, then went from being always earl…

The first word that pops into my head after I hear "spring" is "cleaning," probably because three kids plus one dog equals a lot of cleaning at any time of the year. And with today being the first day of spring (yay!), my free app of the…

When your preschooler wants to play, but you really need a few uninterrupted minutes to finish some work or get dinner on the table, we've found an entire menagerie of adorable friends who will be happy to set up a playdate at any time. …

I can vaguely remember those new-mom days as a haze of me struggling to figure out how to juggle diapers, sleep schedules and pumping. The Glow Baby app (iOs and Android ) simplifies all of that into one place, and it would have been gre…

Whether your travels this year take you halfway across the world, to your favorite beachside resort a few hours away, or to the campground you've been visiting since the kids were toddlers, I've found an easy, beautiful, and free app for…

At first glance, Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector may look like a cute cartoony app for young kids to waste a few minutes of their day. Yet, it's one of the few apps in my household that has the parents, teens, and my younger tween all hooke…

As much as I love the vastness of the internet, sometimes I just want to find the perfect little black dress (should Liz and Kristen not be around to tell me just what to buy!) or the name of a great family restaurant at the beach withou…

Whenever my husband and I manage to squeeze in a date night dinner, I have to be very conscious of my iPhone usage. He does not appreciate the lemme just check this one thing real quick business, not in the slightest. I get it, though. H…

This is a sponsored message from VidMob Take all those videos of school concerts, soccer games, even family vacations sucking up memory on your smartphone and turn them into professionally-edited masterpieces you'll watch over and over t…

Since starting to Konmari, or "tidy," my home almost a year ago, I've found myself avoiding certain categories of stuff left to purge, like the four large bins of CDs we've had stored in our basement since switching all our music over to…