Your NYC Neighbor – is a way of introducing New Yorkers to a rich community of savvy parents and business owners. New York is a diverse City bustling with all kinds of families and personalities. We also love to grab tips and recommendations from moms and dads in certain neighborhoods and throughout the 5 Boroughs, and especially people who have created a product, service or site that helps new parents. Meet Callie and Denise from SkipKid.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
C: I grew up in Cooperstown, New York, in a village of two thousand people. We had one stoplight, one school, one post office…. My husband also grew up in a small town so it’s exciting and novel to be raising our two girls in the city. Just before my first daughter was born, in 2013, I published my first novel. Now I’m running a start-up with Denise, whom I met when I was a brand-new mom. Life changes quickly!
D: Brooklyn has been home for the last 15+ years. I can’t imagine living anywhere else – I met my husband here, had my 2 babies here – it’s my happy place. I’ve been in private practice as psychotherapist for 8 years and love my work. It has also been a wonderful experience exercising a new part of my brain developing SkipKid and collaborating with Callie.
Where do you live?
C: Park Slope
D: Park Slope
Why do you love living there?
C: Prospect Park! I’ve lived near this park for twelve years. It’s one of New York’s greatest resources, from playgrounds and water parks to grassy meadows and shady nooks. Denise and I have spent entire afternoons exploring the park with our kids. It’s fun to see it through their eyes.
D: I reluctantly moved to Park Slope a couple years ago after living in Williamsburg for more than a decade, but in no time found a wonderful sense of community here. Living near Prospect Park is amazing, especially with 2 little ones. Plus, I never would have met Callie had we not moved here – that alone makes it a great place to live.
Tell us about SkipKid?
SkipKid is a mobile website that features a complete, up-to-date listing of all drop-in activities in Brooklyn, sort-able by neighborhood. It’s free to use and to subscribe. We send out a couple of emails a week to our subscribers with our recommendations for mid-week and weekend family activities. We cover about twenty Brooklyn neighborhoods and are especially active in neighborhoods with a ton of kid-friendly activities: Park Slope, BoCoCa, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Brooklyn Heights, Prospect Heights, etc.
What’s so neat about this booking platform?
When our children were a few months old, we began looking for activities for the kids and quickly realized that there was no reliable, comprehensive resource for drop-in activities in our neighborhood. Scheduling activities between naps and mealtimes can be a challenge, and we imagined other moms and caregivers felt the same way. So we started SkipKid.
We tried to make the site as user friendly as possible. SkipKid works on any computer or mobile device. Simply select your neighborhood from the drop-down menu to find a complete list of daily drop-in activities. We encourage users to subscribe for weekly emails featuring special weekday and weekend events as well.
What’s next for SkipKid?
We launched SkipKid in September and have grown to have more than a thousand monthly users. We are looking to expand our reach to all the neighborhoods we cover, and we expect to move into Manhattan, too.