I have spent an absurd number of hours over the last two decades complaining about mobile development. It is slow. Xcode breaks. Certificates expire. Simulators stop working. And no matter how many apps you have shipped, you can still lose half a day because you cannot find the damn button in some Apple or Google console. So I am still processing what happened last week. I took Hold My Juice, my…
A few weeks ago, the head coach of the reigning NWSL champions did something faintly radical: he left. Juan Carlos Amorós had just watched his Gotham FC side score three goals in the last 17 minutes to beat Seattle, with the club climbing toward the top of the table — and he announced he was stepping away for five weeks to be with his newborn daughter. His reasoning was almost suspiciously…
If I'm honest, most weekdays with my son aren't really time with my son . They're logistics. Get him ready for school. Get him ready for bed. Two handovers with a workday wedged in between, and somewhere in there I keep telling myself the good stuff happens at the weekend. That's not quality time. That's a shift pattern. For a long time I treated that as a personal failing — a me problem I'd solve…
Parents are more stressed and more isolated than ever — and the free spaces that welcome families keep disappearing. So where are we actually supposed to go? The short version The 2024 US Surgeon General's advisory found parents are far more stressed than other adults — and lonelier, too. In England, 429 playgrounds closed between 2012–2022; two million under-nines don't live within a 10-minute…
My daughter has vestibular processing issues, which means movement doesn’t always become automatic for her. Holding a pen was hard. Jumping was hard. You don’t realize jumping has steps until you have to teach them one by one. She has made enormous progress, helped by a wonderful IEP team in Cambridge. But for years, I carried a quiet grief. It wasn’t really about pens or jumping. It was about…
What a heatwave, a sleepless toddler, and a phone that won't stop ringing taught two perfectionist founders about why women leave the workforce — and why we started a company instead. It's the kind of hot in the UK where my laptop, my patience, and my son's bedroom are all running at roughly the same temperature. He isn't sleeping. Which means I'm not sleeping. Which means I have now made genuine…
This weekend, my daughter wanted to join a random public Minecraft server. We had planned to let her play online with a friend, but that friend had temporarily lost iPad privileges. My daughter did not understand why this should change anything. "Why are you so scared?" "I can handle it." "Why do you always worry about bad people?" It was a classic internet-safety argument. There might be an adult…
I genuinely enjoy hanging out with my kids, even when they're annoying. We bring them on anniversary dinners — they like oysters and caviar too, and I'd rather put the babysitter money toward the meal. I love traveling with them, seeing places through their eyes, collecting the stories that emerge from the disasters: the biggest meltdown of all time, the afternoon I was informed I was literally…
On travel, kids, and productive friction I am a planner, but not the disaster-prepper kind. I'm the kind who wants to know all the things. Find the café that isn't in any guidebook. Arrive at the airport absurdly early because the buffer feels good. Pack the jacket. My kids actually call me "Jacket Guy," because there is always, always a jacket in my bag, just in case someone's cold. The planning…
When your kid’s backpack carries their most precious items as much as it does their books and homework. My son doesn't know he has a "primary parent." To him, it's simple. This is his home. He sleeps here every night, his things are here, his life is built here. Some afternoons, instead of coming straight home, he spends a few hours with his dad. There's no main house and no other house in his…
How a Sunday afternoon and a vibe-coding tool got me a beta CRM that actually fits how we work. After Boston Tech Week, I came home with a head full of people. The two parents I met at a dinner who turned out to be exactly the kind of messy, multi-household, over-scheduled families we're building Hold My Juice for. The potential investor who’s also a parent of 3 kids. All in my head. I wanted one…
When my co-founder and I started Hold My Juice , we made a promise to each other early on: Family-first couldn't just be a slogan. It had to be an operational practice . The entire point of our company is to help families experience more joy, more presence, more ease. More forts, less logistics. If we destroyed our own families building that, it would be a tragedy. And honestly, a pretty absurd…
The Arnold Arboretum lets you picnic exactly one day a year. It's called Lilac Sunday and it’s on Mother’s Day. Our two families have done Mother's Day together for three years, but this was our first time at the Arboretum, and the bar was clear: our picnic had to be epic. So we bought seven cheeses from Formaggio Kitchen . Plus olives, honey, mostarda, a few jams. Everyone in our group has…
I used to think I had a decent system for kid haircuts: Pinterest board, scroll together, pick something, show the stylist. It worked… until The Bangs . The Problem Bangs are fun until they’re not. Suddenly they’re in your eyes, doing weird things in the morning, and require way more maintenance than anyone signed up for. So when my 8-year-old said she wanted to “cut them out,” I knew three…
I spent an embarrassing amount of time searching for the right tool for our company. Not just for me as an engineer living in GitHub. For us — a two-person founding team managing product, fundraising, partnerships, and the thousand invisible threads that actually move a startup forward. I ran the usual gauntlet. Linear. Trello. Notion. Each one solved part of the problem and introduced a new one.…
How AI helped me keep the most important part of Passover — when I had nothing left to give. When lived in SF, a rabbi told me something I have never forgotten. If you do nothing else for Passover, she said, tell the story. Not the four questions. Not the proper seder plate arrangement. Not even the right foods in the right order. The story. Experience it as if you, too, had been a slave in Egypt…
Last Sunday I ordered hair clips from Machete . They came packed in biodegradable corn starch packing peanuts. My kids found the box before I could unpack it. We were heading to a café at the ICA and they wanted to bring the box. Fine. I also packed markers and paper like a person who has their life together. The paper stayed blank the entire time. What happened instead: someone touched a marker…
When we started building Hold My Juice, we had a conviction: the AI should adapt to your family. Not some generic assistant voice. Your family's voice. We built the whole experience around this. We even generated custom juice box mascots for each family based on what we knew about them, their personality, their energy, what made them tick. And families loved it. The juice boxes, the tone, the…
Screenshot of New York Times article cover photo about Homeland Security demanding social media sites reveal their data so they can identify Anti-Ice posts CREDIT: NY TIMES
Parents are not doing it all. We’re just damn good at being decisive and prioritizing efficiently. And if that annoys you, I get it. Because from the outside, it can look like parents are thriving. Like we’ve cracked some secret productivity code. Like we’re out here “having it all” with a label maker and a color-coded calendar. That’s not what’s happening. People without kids already feel like…