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A Smarter Parent started as a personal blog to share fun ideas with other parents about things to do with their kids, ways to explore their world around them, go out and have adventures, and just enjoy each other. For a variety of reasons, I never was able to put the effort into the project that I would have liked to.

Recently I came to realize that I wanted to work on a variety of things that were significant undertakings that deserved their own unique attention, but I wanted to bring these projects back under one umbrella. I decided to revisit this orphaned project to create a hub for other related projects. A Smarter Parent was the motivation for me to go on and keep trying things, more focused projects that might amount to something down the road.

I do make more updates here now, and this is the place to come if you’d like to learn more about some of my other efforts.

Projects

Kidtins

On a recent trip to the city, we visited the SF MOMA museum store and found this interesting little game about building princess castles. It was a fairly inexpensive travel game that had customized wooden castle pieces and  6 color dice (instead of numbers). I had purchased it thinking it would be fairly boring, but we had an hour train ride home so I thought why not. Sitting on one of the newer Caltrain cars (the 3 of us at a 4 seat table section) we proceeded to play several games. My younger daughter even invited someone to come sit and play with us also.
I ended up thinking about this game quite often over the next week or so. It was a simple albeit interesting game mechanic I thought could be applied elsewhere. All it really involved was rolling a 6 sided dice, getting your 1-5 pieces in place, then rolling for the 6 first. I didn’t want to manufacture something and try and sell it, and I liked the idea of the kids with a DIY (do it yourself) project, I came up with the idea for The Train Game and proceeded to put together several prototypes that would fit within an Altoids mint tin.
The game is also the price of a mobile app and is something you can easily replace if lost or share with friends and family. The Train Game is the first version of this mechanic for sale, and others are currently in the works.

Kiddiewalks

Growing up and living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I feel incredibly lucky to have so many wonderful options to take my kids out and do amazing things that are less than an hour drive away. I like to record as many memories as I can and tend to post a lot of pictures to social media. Other parent friends of mine constantly pull me aside and ask how I get the kids out so often to so many interesting places.
I got the idea to start putting together small PDF based travel guides that would cost about the price of a mobile app that had plans focused on one area, gives some suggestions for walks or hikes, some history, photo tips, interesting facts, coloring pages, games, and other things to keep the kids interested and occupied while out having fun.

1-2-3 Things

Part of the Kiddiewalks project, this was a free weekly newsletter with a loose itinerary for a nice day out with the family, some links to places mentioned, and just some basic ideas to get you motivated to so you have a nice day out with your family. You can still search the archives.

Writing

Non-Fiction

Adventuring.in

Adventuring.in – Getting out for Day-Trip Adventures
Successfully get out for regular day trip adventures with your kids

Having developed a number of tricks to get out with my kids on regular adventures all over the Bay Area, I thought it might be useful to share some of these with other parents. I bought a Kindle earlier this year and came across a self-published e-book about writing non-fiction e-books. After coming up with my outline, I’ve been chipping away at this as my spare time allows, usually on my commute typing on my phone into Evernote. I think I’ve been able to put together a decent amount of information along with some stories to illustrate ideas presented here.

Several other books in two series are now also planned.

Adventuring.in – Getting Out Series

  • Adventuring.in – Getting out for Day-Trip Adventures
  • Adventuring.in – Getting out for Overnight Adventures
  • Adventuring.in – Getting out for Road Trip Adventures
  • Adventuring.in – Getting out for Adventures Abroad

Adventuring.in – Out On Adventure Series

  • Adventuring.in – 52 Weekend Adventures around the SF Bay Area
  • Adventuring.in – 25 Overnight Adventures around the SF Bay Area
  • Adventuring.in – 15 Road Trip Adventures from the SF Bay Area
  • Adventuring.in – 5 Travel Abroad Adventures from the SF Bay Area

Fiction

Untitled – a young adult adventure
Having some success writing the non-fiction book, I wanted to write something a bit more personal. A story that involved a bit of adventure and history around San Francisco. It’s still a bit early, but the outline has started and as soon as Adventuring is published on Amazon I intend to get writing this full speed.

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