Little Lexicon on Trilingual Mama

Maria from Trilingual Mama was one of the first people to sign up for Little Lexicon. Her input has be invaluable for resolving a few issues with the application. In other words she's a trooper for putting up with a few bugs. :)

She has 4 (!) kids,  and the youngest Remy is of Little Lexicon age. She recently needed to go out of town for a few days and leave her kids with a relative. Perfect opportunity to road test her Little Lexicon book!

Read her post here.

I'm really curious to see how helpful the book was for the relatives keeping the kids.

Little Lexicon on Kid World Citizen

Kid World Citizen is an awesome blog focused on raising kids to be citizens of the whole planet. If you are looking for a way to introduce your small ones to world culture and the value that differences can bring you'll want to check it out.

Recently they invited me to write a guest post there about Little Lexicon. Read it here. Becky, the owner of the blog was very gracious in lending me her respectably sized soapbox. :) Her blog is great, and I'm just happy to be a part of the network.

You can read more about Becky here. She's kind of amazing.

Balancing aspirations and reality in parenthood

Raising kids has to be the most rewarding experience possible in life. All the moments of amazing, sublime joy are simply too numerous to even count. But as they say, those things most worth doing are often the most difficult thing to do.

Our life over the past year has gotten more and more hectic. Our oldest boy is now 2.5 years old and really a pretty manageable and easy going kid. The temper tantrums are less and less, and he's generally very easy to handle. The little one is 10 months, and is also pretty easy going. Even with this advantage there is never a down moment.

Me and my wife both work from home, and this means we are often at odds over working hours. We're lucky to have relatives nearby who babysit regularly, but even then I don't seem to manage more than 15 or 20 hours of work in a good week. This gets really frustrating.

Building Little Lexicon was a big experiment for me. If I had a normal working schedule the app could have been ready months ago. Over the course of about 6 months I managed to get it put together, and I'm now at the point where I can maintain it with the little time I have during the week.

For me the hardest part is not the work / life balance, but rather the reality / aspirations balance. How to manage your expectations when there are severe external limits to what you can achieve. This has been a great source of frustration and even anger in moments when there are things that I need to do but cannot get to.

I love having kids, and it's such an inspiration on many fronts, but it also can become tough mentally when you feel like you are not achieving what you want to.

I curious how other parents deal with this. Any tricks or advice for a young father?

I'm having a lot of fun making themes

Probably too much. I'm afraid I might not be able to stop actually.

When you create a book you can choose a theme which influences the color scheme of the UI that people will see when they view your book, as well as giving you a nifty bookcover design. Here are
some of them so far.

They also have some pretty silly names. ^_^

Little Lexicon is online!

After many months of design, planning, development, family arguments and late nights, I am proud to present a fully functional Little Lexicon!

Click here to check it out!

Little Lexicon greets the world

Right now, all across the internet routers and servers are updating their cached information regarding Little Lexicon. One region at a time Little Lexicon will begin to greet to world.

In a few hours these changes will have taken effect and the site will be live!

Head over to littlelexicon.com now to see if your area has gone live yet. If not feel free to signup for the newsletter and I will let you know immediately when it does so.

As an added bonus you'll also get a promocode good for one free $5 book upgrade.

Sign up and find out why families shouldn't have language barriers. 

How to login without a password

It probably feels weird to login to a web service without a password. Like leaving the house without wearing pants. That's ok. You look fine without pant. In fact, you look better without them. They were limiting your true self.

Ehem.

Anyways, here is a walk through of how it works, just incase you need some extra help in your pantlessness.

1.

First of all get to the home page at http://littlelexicon.com, and enter your email in the login box. Top right. See the image for a visual.

2. 

After that you will be taken to the token claim page, and an email will be sent off to the address you just entered. The page looks like this.

You will receive an email that looks like this. Either copy the token from the mail into the "Claim your login" form, or simply click the link. It can be handy to type the token if, for instance, you are reading the mail from your mobile, while using the site on a laptop.

3. 

That's it! You're logged in! Now that was't so hard was it? :)