Forward the school email. It pulls out the dates, asks you
once whether it got them right, and puts the day on the fridge.
Ben's karate and Ana's dance are both at six. Dana was down to drive both.
Elmwood P.S. — Fall Newsletter
Dance club starts Thursday Sept 10, 6.30pm in the gym.
Ana is registered. Please send indoor shoes.
Picture day is Tuesday the 15th, arrive by 8:45am.
As always, Nan is welcome to do the Tuesday pickups.
me and ben
Thursday, 6:04 pmFraser
THEN 6:30 pm Cubs
· 7:30 pm Parent-teacher interviews
e-ink 7.5″ · redraws
when the day changes
Forward it. That is the whole setup.
Nothing gets on the wall until a person says yes.
The queue below is the product. Every guess shows the email it
came from, what it concluded, and waits.
01 — IT ARRIVES
TO faimily+fraser99@faimily.ca
Apologies for the short notice — the Thursday 6.30pm
dance class is moving to Fridays at the same time, effective Sept 18.
Karate on Thursdays is unaffected.
A photo of a permission slip works the same way.
02 — IT SHOWS ITS WORKING
6:30 pmDancerepeats Fridays replaces Dance at 6:30 pm
Thursdays — that one stops
Added. The Thursday class stops on the 17th.
03 — IT LANDS
Friday 18 Septemberthe week after
—
Nothing yet
dance is still on Thursdays
6:30 pm
✧Dance
Ana · nobody down to drive
WAITING on somebody to
read the card next to this one
The bit nobody else catches
Two kids can't clash. One parent can.
Nothing is wrong with Ben at
karate and Ana at dance. Both at six, in different places, is a perfectly
ordinary Thursday — until you notice Dana is down to drive to both. No
other calendar sees it, because none of them store who drives.
Neither child is double-booked. Nothing looks wrong.
The driver is. And it stays invisible until somebody is standing
in the driveway at six.
And when nobody is down to drive at all, it says so before the
week starts — never who drove most. A tally is an accusation; a gap is
a problem anyone can fix.
Nobody down to drive
Fri 4:00 pmChoir — Ana needs a liftTue 5:30 pmSwim club — Ana needs a lift
not a scoreboard — just the gaps.
Hi Ana
How did today go?
Karate
6:00 pm
Good
OK
Too much
Only you see these. Nobody gets told about one tap.
The person being scheduled
Kids get a say. Quietly.
Every other family app takes input
from the adult doing the coordinating. The child is data in somebody else's
calendar. How an eight-year-old feels about Thursdays is not in any inbox —
no model can infer it, because it does not exist until she says so.
Three buttons, no typing. Nothing a child writes
ever reaches a model.
One tap tells nobody. Three the same, and a parent
hears “Ana has flagged Thursdays three times.”
Never a score. No streaks, no percentages, no
“62% of tasks”. A report card teaches a child to lie to it.
What it learned, and how to correct it
You can read its mind. And change it.
It writes down how the household actually runs. Plain sentences,
in a list, with a button on every one.
0.9Nan does the Tuesday pickup
logistics · seen 6× · last 1 Sept
0.7Ana cannot handle two activities back to
back
constraint · seen 3× · last 20 Aug
0.6Thursdays are the tight evening
routine · seen 4× · last 27 Aug
Everyone else's assistant learns
silently. Ours hands you the list.
Where it lives
Start with the tablet in your drawer.
We sell no hardware. Bring a screen you already own; buy a
proper panel later, or never.
Screen
Cost
Why
A dead tablet
$0
Retired, not broken. It is plugged in, so the flat battery does
not matter
E-ink, 7.5″
~$139
Three months on a charge. No glow. Cannot become a tablet, which
is the point
E-ink, 10.3″
~$229
The fridge board. The week, not just the day
Your phone
$0
Where the confirming and the adding actually happen
Thursday 10 SeptFraser
7:30 am
≋Swim squad
Ben · Dana drives
bring cap and goggles
8:45 am
▣Picture day
Ana · Sam drives
bring clean jumper
6:00 pm
▲Karate
Ben · Dana drives
DANA
6:00 pm
✧Dance
Ana · Dana drives
DANA
THEN 4:00 pm Choir ·
4:00 pm Tutoring · 5:00 pm Swimming · 6:30 pm Cubs · +1 more
They are not the same picture at two sizes. The 7.5″ is widescreen and
one bit — black or white, nothing between, so a clash is an inverted block
rather than red, which reads harder across a kitchen anyway. The 10.3″
is nearly square, has sixteen greys to spend, and fits half a day rather
than the next few hours. Same wall, two different drawings.
A wall calendar assumes
you can read.
ben knows the wavy one means swimming.
Which leaves out
the person in the house who most needs to know what today is. Every
activity carries a symbol, so a four-year-old can look up at the fridge
and know there is swimming.
Drawn flat,
not emoji — an e-ink panel has one colour to spend, and a coloured
picture turns to mud on it.
≋
swim
▲
karate
✧
dance
♫
choir
⬤
football
✚
dentist
▪
school
⌂
scouts
Where the data sits
Canadian. Properly.
Every serious competitor is
American, and so is their storage. Your children's weekly routine sits in a
US cloud, reachable under the CLOUD Act. That is not a slogan for us — it
is an architecture.
Hosted in Canada, backups included — a Canadian primary with a US
replica is not residency.
The model call counts too. That is the part everyone gets wrong.
Never sold. Never trained on. Export and delete are buttons, not
support tickets.
Or run the whole thing on a box in your own house. The code is
open.
We forward a school newsletter to a server in Vancouver.
Not to Los Angeles.
What it costs
Three ways in.
The software is free either way. What you are paying for is not
having to run mail, a server, and backups for the rest of your life.
Tinkerer
$5 /mo
Your own screens and server
Full API, self-host, data export
Community support
Or run it free — the code is open
Most families
$10 /mo
Set up for you, calendars connected
A forwarding address that works day one
Household memory and clash alerts
A person answers your email
Two homes
$20 /mo
One child, two households
Grandparents and carers, scoped access
Access that expires on a date
A handover log
A grandparent gets Tuesdays until
December, and then stops. Not an account with your whole life in it.