Tuesday, January 7, 2014

A Useful Tool For Parents Of Young Children: Kid-Friendly Places

Have you ever decided to go to a cafe, maybe somewhere new, then discovered when your newborn's diaper exploded that there's no change table in their bathroom?  Or maybe you wanted to grab a quick bite at a restaurant with a friend or two when you were all hungry, only to discover that they don't have even one single high chair for your squirmy one-year-old? Going out to anywhere new with little kids requires an advance reconnaissance mission, I find, so I end up going to the same places again & again when I know they're kid-friendly.

When Melissa Nunes' friend had a baby, they too found themselves in the dark trying to find places to go. Her family lived back East & she didn't have any friends with babies yet. Melissa was inspired to help out after an outing one day:

"One time I was hanging out with her and a new mom friend she had made who insisted on showing us the nursing lounge in the Granville Island Public Market. It was a quite nice private room with a couple of chairs, a sink, & a change table. They fed their babies away from the hustle & bustle of the rest of the market & shared information about other kid-friendly places that they had discovered around the city, & I thought, someone should put this on a map!”

I'm sure a lot of us have had ideas like that, but Melissa has the know-how to make it happen. As a geographic information analyst & programmer, she has experience with developing mapping applications like the Cycle Vancouver website (back before Google Maps offered cycling directions). She created Kid-Friendly Places, an interactive map of places that are good to go with children, in her spare time.

Kid Friendly Places shows cafes, restaurants, accommodations, stores, activities, parks & other places that are rated as child-friendly by members. The application shows spots that are good for breastfeeding, where the change tables are & other details that you need to know when out on the town with a baby or a toddler.


Melissa lives in East Vancouver in the Dickens neighbourhood, near me, so that's where a lot of the information is. So far. But that's where you come in, my dear readers. Melissa isn't making any money from the site & has done all the work on her own in between full-time contracts--Kid-Friendly Places needs you. Anyone can sign up for free & enter information on the map, so you can share your knowledge of your neighbourhood. You can also up-vote places that already exist on the map, or add notes about your experience there.

Please visit Kid-Friendly Places & add a place or two that you know, & share this with your friends!



Follow Spokesmama here too:

2 comments:

  1. This is AMAZING!! What a fantastic idea!! There are even some places already on the map of Charlotte, NC! I'm going to add a few more and tell my friends. Thanks so much!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Add away! The more people that do, the better it works, right? :)

      Delete

Thanks for commenting! (I've had to enable comment moderation on older posts to thwart spammers, so your post may not appear right away.)

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...