Rompr Blog

Is it just me, or is it really annoying when even websites that pretend to be for “parents” and not just for “moms,” still seem to think of parenting as a woman’s issue?

Case in point: Huffington Post, where the “Parents” sub-section is for some reason under the “Women” section.

And look at a site like Babble.com - they have a dedicated Dads section, but the assumption seems to be that it’s only for stay-at-home dads. Working dads are parents too, guys.

Can we leave the 50s behind already?

Yes we can! Coming soon, on Rompr

My new year’s resolution list is very short this year:

1) Don’t make any new year’s resolutions

So, I’m pretty much breaking this year’s new-year’s-resolution the moment I’m making it. Which means I’m completely free from the stress of having to try to keep my new year’s resolutions while all the time knowing that I’ll definitely be breaking them. 

FREEDOM. Try it yourselves. It’s fun!

We’ve been working on rompr for over three months now so it sometimes catches me by surprise that not everybody in the whole wide world has already heard of us.

Hello? Are you serious? But we’ve been here for months!

But then, of course, I remind myself that we’re not even up yet (though, if you’re here and haven’t signed up yet, you should! you’re awesome!).

And we do still have a list of things to do before we launch. Right now, we’re in the middle of a rush to get our backend ready for the masses: new and shiny cloud-based server, nerd-friendly databases, everything optimized and ready (fingers crossed) for millions of happy users. These are exciting times for the geeks at rompr HQ!

What? Do you mean you don’t think we’ll have to handle that many users right from the start? But we’ve been here for months!

So come on. Spread the word. Don’t be naughty, be nice  

My son was 4.5 years old when we moved to France, and spoke exactly one word in French: Non. Useful as that word was (and still is), I was a little worried about how he would settle in, starting out in a new school with a completely new language.

It turned out he was absolutely fine - after about 2 (not so easy, but that’s another whole post right there) weeks, his teacher told me that he seemed to understand what she was saying. And pretty soon after that he started to speak French. It was truly amazing. Was the boy a genius?

Not really. Even I, with my less-than-adequate French, could tell he was mainly speaking gibberish, with a bit of a French accent. He would start talking with French kids, and I could see they didn’t really get what he was saying, but it didn’t stop any of them from playing with him. And it didn’t take much longer for him to start producing real words, phrases and sentences, just comme il faut.

There were a few other non-French kids at his school, and when he was already happily chatting away in non-standard but mostly-intelligible French, they were still mostly silent. They weren’t any less talented than my son - all little kids are good at learning new languages, and a few months later they were all on the same level - but he was the one who was comfortable making mistakes, trying out this new language when he didn’t really have the hang of it yet, while other kids preferred to wait until they were pitch-perfect.

My little boy taught me a lesson: getting it wrong isn’t just OK: it’s AWESOME. And his timing was perfect, too, because not long after he started speaking French, I started working on rompr. And in a startup, it’s all about iterations: you start out shaky, you get some feedback, you fix something and you try out again. And you also hear a lot of Non :-)

So in the spirit of the season, we wish you all a year of new beginnings and happy learning - from your mistakes, from your kids, from your friends. And, of course, a year of awesome romping!

Before my daughter was born, I couldn’t imagine how I would have enough time for two children - my son seemed to take up every minute of my non-working time. How would I handle two? Where would I find the extra time?

As it turned out, I didn’t find any extra time (I guess this has something to do with the laws of physics, but my sleep-deprived brain believed it was something I could overcome). My daughter simply doesn’t get nearly as much attention as my son did when he was her age. It’s not that I purposefully neglect her, I just rarely get a chance to play just with her, read a story just to her, go somewhere just the two of us. All these things that were a matter of course when I only had one child.

So I decided I was going to try to fix it: I would go and have a date with one kid at a time. It wouldn’t be the usual case of my daughter tagging along to an activity that’s mostly intended for kids her brother’s age. It would be just me and her, doing something fun, and then going to eat at a restaurant and having a lovely conversation. And another time, it would be just me and my son, with all my attention focused on him and with no annoying “let your sister try too,” “pay attention to your sister” nagging from me.

It turned out to be a great idea - single kid dates are awesome. I managed one per kid per month so far (and yes, that makes one in total. But I have big plans :-))

It will all be easier once I can find fun kid-date ideas on rompr