Hi! I’m Debbie Rose. In addition to working as an intellectual property fellow here at ACT | The App Association, I try my best to keep a very busy family running smoothly. This is no small task with a husband and three active kids. Randy works in management consulting and the kids are involved in school, piano, hockey, softball, sewing, baseball, flag football, and church. Seriously, we need all the help we can get to make sure everyone gets where they need to be on time and ready to go. Apps to the rescue!
During the winter months, we start our day by checking Accuweather to see if the temps will get high enough to wear shorts – that’s 32 degrees for the Rose boys.
Once the kids are in school, Randy and I head off to work. We are obsessed with Waze to avoid traffic. The user input feature is super fun. Parkmobile is essential to getting to meetings in DC on time. It allows us to easily pay meter parking and add time if meetings run long. And when we need a little caffeine to get through the day, we use the Starbucks app to pay from our phones – I love the customer loyalty rewards! Finishing the work day, Randy uses internal company apps to quickly fill out time sheets, submit expense reports, and provide performance reviews to his team.
Back on the homefront, I need to get groceries to make sure this hungry family is properly nourished for afternoon and evening activities. With the Wegmans app, I create and store shopping lists, search recipes, and check prices. Believe me, the kids really appreciate this one.
Getting regular exercise is necessary to keep up up with these kids. MyFitnessPal helps motivate me to “feel the burn” and watch my calories. It’s hard to justify the large fries when you know exactly how many miles you’ll need to run to burn them off!
With the kids home, we check school apps for homework assignments and grades. After a quick snack (or dinner #1), the kids are off to evening activities. We rely on Sport Ngin, Teamsnap and Shutterfly for practice, game schedules, team photos, and any last minute changes. With three kids in travel sports, organizational apps for teams are crucial to getting to the right place at the right time.
Long car rides and out-of-town games are no longer dreaded thanks to the myriad of cool game and entertainment apps on the market. Currently, the kids are loving Minecraft because they can all connect to the same world from their own devices. Quiet car rides with kids getting along? Crazy!
Of course we take pictures of our little cherubs during their games and want to share them with family. I use the Cieva app to instantly send pics to the grandparents’ Cieva picture frames. They love it – especially when they remember to turn on the frame…sigh.
Then, when the kids are finally sleeping, we finally get a chance to catch up on the admin side of running the house. I’ve been enjoying the ease of using the Numbers app to create spreadsheets on my iPad for the family calendar, to-do lists and financial planning.
And with Valentine’s Day coming up, I am hoping my husband will be using the Open Table app so we can reward ourselves for being totally awesome parents!