The Uplift Holiday Playbook: Cristina Muresan, founder of Uplift, on holiday planning

Summer holidays are meant to be a time for family connection, adventure and making memories. But for many parents, they also bring a surge of planning: organising childcare, coordinating schedules, booking activities, packing for outings – and somehow balancing it all with work and everyday life.

To explore how families can reduce the mental load and create more space for what matters, we spoke with Cristina Muresan, founder of Uplift. A project and product manager by background, Cristina was inspired to build the app after becoming a mother and experiencing firsthand the complexity of managing family life. In this conversation, she shares practical insights on holiday planning, letting go of perfection, managing shared responsibilities and creating more moments of connection with our children.

Uplift: School holidays can be one of the busiest times for parents. What does that season look like in your family?

Cristina: So, we’re actually still in the nursery age, and we’re very happy that the problem is not upon us, but a lot of our friends and family are going through it.

In many ways, the holidays feel like you’re there to take a holiday as a parent, you’re there to relax, but in reality, that’s not always the case. A really big part of that is the childcare around it. You’re suddenly going from having childcare during your working hours to the kids being at home, needing to be entertained, going to summer camps, spending time with grandparents or alternating between different carers. So suddenly, there’s quite a lot of logistics involved. At the same time, many of us can’t take as much time off as our kids have, so we’re juggling work, care and wanting to give our kids the best experiences, right? Outside of just the logistics, we want to make sure that the few summers we have with our young children are really well spent: that we take that big holiday that we wanted to go to, that we take them to the forest to learn about animals and plants, that we share in our hobbies with them... So that adds another layer.

It’s easy to say, ‘let’s just go and do that’, but usually you need to pack for it, plan it, find a location. That’s why I think it’s important for parents to put some order into the influx of information and decisions that come with the summer holidays, so they can enjoy them too. I would love to spend my holidays playing with my kids on the beach, but I can only do that once I know everything else has been sorted. What Uplift – and productivity tools more generally – can bring is a bit more structure and a feeling of control, so that parents can relax and enjoy the summer with their children. It’s a very long way of saying: we need something like this even more as the school holidays are upon us.

Uplift: And how do you exactly use Uplift to get that order in your life?

Cristina: So there are a few key themes. One is childcare – really just mapping out who is responsible for the kids each day, from pick-ups and drop-offs to camps and everything in between. Anything that’s already planned goes into the calendar so there’s clarity for everyone involved.

I also use it to plan activities and to get activity ideas. Sometimes you’re at home in the afternoon, you want to make the most of it, you don’t really have an idea. I would probably open up Lyft or go into collections, and I’ll find some ideas of activities with my kids that involve the outdoors, because we’re trying to spend as much time outdoors as possible.

I would also mention that Uplift is meant for the family, but you can have quite a broad definition of family. So when my mom is over, for example, we would add her on the app. You can have as many carers as you want, as many people in your village as you want in the app. So being able to share these responsibilities with a broader group of people, even if it’s just seasonal, I think always helps.

‘To your question, the expectation is thinking about what’s magical for your kids, and not what’s magical online, and that would make you feel a little bit more relaxed, and they would probably still have a very lovely time.’ Cristina Muresan

Uplift: But I’m guessing it also took you some time to get to this stage. Do you want to tell us about a planning mistake or a lesson that you learned from in this journey?

Cristina: Yeah, I think there’s really high expectations on the holidays. Probably a bit more on Christmas and Easter and so on, but I think there’s quite a big expectation on summer holidays as well, especially for time outdoors and going to the beach and so on.

There’s quite a lot of expectations around making moments magical, and a lot of the content online has maybe a different definition of magical than what our kids do. For Easter, we were meant to make Easter hats. Like, what the hell is an Easter hat, right? But nursery wanted us to make an Easter hat, and if you look on Pinterest, there’s loads of bunnies, and drawings and arts, and so on... And whereas that I think arts are a really important part of a kid’s life, this Pinterest-perfect look about holidays is putting a lot of pressure on parents.

This year, from our experience, what we did is, we travelled to the grandparents, we completely forgot about Easter crafts, stopped at the shop at the last moment, and they were sold out. So, I got a bunch of kinder eggs and I hid them across the garden. And our kid had the loveliest time. He’s still speaking about it months later, because for him, that was magical enough.

To your question, the expectation is thinking about what’s magical for your kids, and not what’s magical online, and that would make you feel a little bit more relaxed, and they would probably still have a very lovely time.

Uplift: That leads me to my final question: how do you use Uplift to create more moments of connection with your children – so that the app actually helps you stay off the app?

Cristina: Yeah, it’s really well phrased, because we have made the app with a view that you need to stay off the app. It takes so long in some other apps, just to sit there and record all the things, and the reason we wanted to add voice mode is because, quite realistically, most of the time, I have a baby in hand, a toddler holding onto my leg, and I’m trying to use my devices as little as possible.

But specifically for the moments of connection, one of the things that I felt very strongly as a parent is that it’s so easy to be inundated in your life with all of the admin that you don’t intentionally make time for connection and for things that really matter.

What we encourage in Uplift is to, first of all, state your values and what’s important to your family, both as a testament to yourself and also for us to suggest things to you that align with it. Because of course you need to make time in your calendar for the admin, but why wouldn’t you make time explicitly for the moments of connection?

That’s why we’ve built is a monthly insight that reviews your values, reviews how you spend your time, and then can flag to you and say ‘Time in nature is very important to you, but this month, I’ve seen you’ve not really been out. Is it still of importance? And if so, should we help you take one small step towards it? Should we plan a park date for tomorrow morning?’

We’re trying to reveal the things about you that you’ve told us you want and are important to you, and make sure that you make space in your calendar for them, because if you want to be intentional, you actually need to book these moments of connections, these moments of delight with your family.

As the conversation comes to a close, Cristina leaves us with a reminder that tends to get lost in the rush of planning and caring for everyone else: summer holidays belong to parents too. Amid the logistics and desire to create meaningful experiences for their children, it’s just as important for parents to carve out small moments of freedom and rest for themselves.

Because the goal isn’t just to get through the summer – it’s to actually live it, alongside your children, with a little more space to breathe.