3 Essential Family Apps {Thursday 3: July 26, 2018}

Hi, everyone! For today’s Thursday 3, I’m sharing three family apps we use on a daily or near-daily basis in our household. The best part is that all of these family apps are free! Without further ado, let’s get to ’em.

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Our Groceries is a family app that allows all of the smartphones in one house to create and synchronize grocery lists. My husband has an Android phone and I have an iPhone. We searched for an app that we both could use to create our grocery lists, and this was the best one we found. Other apps could be used on both Android and iPhone, but they didn’t look the same or had different features on one platform than on the other.

Our Groceries is pretty simple. You can create different shopping lists for different stores. When you’ve grabbed the item in the store, click on its name on the list and it gets crossed off. You can also add in recipe ingredients and then add those ingredients to your shopping list, but this is a feature we’ve never used.

This family app is a godsend. We started using it when Fi was a newborn with colic. I read The Happiest Baby on the Block by Dr. Harvey Karp and started practicing his 5 S’s for Soothing Babies. The third S is shush. He gives a technique in the book for how to shush your baby, but it’s impossible to shush all night long.

Enter the Sound Sleeper app. It has different white noise sounds, including shhhh, hush, a fan, the womb, and our favorite, the vacuum cleaner. The app is free, but we sprung for the paid version because it allows you to play the app continuously. We play it on our old iPad and have saved ourselves the $50 on the white noise machine I once thought we needed. We are still using it now that Fi is 20 months old, and it helps us sleep since we can hear it over her baby monitor. Winners all around.

Baby Connect is a family app that can be used on iPhones, Android phones, and on your computer. The app allows you to keep track of detailed information on nursing, pumping, bottle feeding, diaper changes, potty training, sleep, drinking from a cup, mood, medical information, vaccines, and milestones.

I’ve found it to be helpful in a variety of situations. When I had to keep Fi on a nursing schedule as a newborn, I used the app to keep track of when she ate last so my sleep-deprived brain had one less thing to remember. It’s also useful when the doctor wants to know specifically when my daughter’s fever began and what medication I gave her. I can tell him in detail the day and time her fever spiked. I’ve also been using it to keep track of her height and weight since she was a newborn.

One great feature about the app is that multiple users can sign in to your account and add information, so moms, dads, grandparents, and baby-sitters can all have access.

We rely heavily on these three family apps to keep us organized and sane! What family apps do you recommend?