If you’re like us, you’ve probably wondered what everyday stuff famous people add to their carts — like hair spray or an electric toothbrush. We asked Dr. Becky Kennedy — who recently launched the Good Inside: Parenting app — about the half-zip sweaters, board game, and one-a-day calendar she can’t live without.
I was gifted this at a G9 conference, a women’s summit, and now I’m definitely a regular buyer. I mean, I am not a makeup person. You can see me. This is how I live in the world. And when I do makeup, my sister always jokes, “That’s not how people do makeup.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” And she’s like, “You just put your fingers in things and put things on your face randomly. Your eye shadow was your blush.” I was like, “Oh, well, that’s how I do makeup.” I feel like Miracle Balm was made for me because I put my fingers in the jar, I rub it around, I put it on my cheekbones. I can use that as an eye shadow; I can use it on my lips. I walk out still feeling very much like me, but feeling a little brighter. It also has the most amazing smell, and now I recommend it to everyone. I don’t have any makeup at my office except for Miracle Balm.
This is a family-favorite game. We love board games. I feel passionate about keeping up a board-game routine with my kids. I feel like it’s the antidote to screen time in a lot of ways. It’s physical; it’s real. You’re paying attention to each other, building relationships, laughing, building frustration tolerance. It’s all good things. I love Sushi Go Party for so many reasons. No. 1, there’s a lot of strategy that can be involved, but if you play with younger kids who might not be at a strategic level, they can just learn the rules and play. Sushi Go Party has a lot of ways you can build the board, and the board kind of becomes the game. That also means that every time you play, it can be a new challenge. Every single person in my family loves this game — me, my husband, my 7-year-old, my tween, my teen — and we play together on weekend mornings. It’s a sizable box, but it is something we’ll bring on a road trip or to a friend’s house, and everyone always has a good time.
Connections, Spelling Bee, Wordle — there’s so many things I love about these games. I do them solo on my subway ride to work, and there’s also a big family element to them. My husband and my older son have friendly but intense Spelling Bee competitions with each other to see who can get to Genius first. There’s an amazing young woman in my office who is a champion crossworder in mini-crosswords, and my oldest son is always trying to beat what he heard is her latest score, but he never can. My younger two often help me with Connections and Wordle. I love watching them work hard and try and then rejoice: “Oh, I figured out Connections!” or “I figured out a new word!” My middle kid is really good at Connections, which is her personality. She’s always looking around the world and connecting things. And Spelling Bee, I think I’m the worst in my family of five, but that doesn’t hold me back and I still engage. It’s a fun, safe, manageable, addictive challenge that seems pretty good in this day and age.
[Editor’s note: The NYT Games app is free to download, with in-app purchases. Subscription plans range from $4.99 to $39.99.]
I think I heard about this first from Sara Blakely herself, the founder of Spanx. On a women’s retreat I go on, there were all these women looking so cozy, and I was like, “What is that?” And so I got my first Spanx Air Essentials Half Zip. And I say “my first” because I now truly have, I think, five or six of them. I have white, black, red, gray, and this goldish tan. There is hardly anything I have multiples of in my closet except for one other item. I just love this pullover. I literally wear it everywhere. I keep two of them in my office for Zoom meetings, or when the AC is cold. I wear one every morning when I’m having my coffee in my cozy chair before my kids are up. I can wear it to my kids’ soccer game, I could wear it out running errands. And honestly, people ask me about it all the time. We do group gifts for my friends’ birthdays, and I always suggest throwing that into the group gift.
This is a sleeper, and I feel like I need everyone to know about it. I have this in our kitchen. It’s a one-a-day calendar, and every day there’s a pretty interesting and completely random fact. One of the things I love about this is that during the school year, it’s a reason for my kids to get dressed and come for breakfast. It’s always a conversation starter: “Oh, did you see the fact of the day?” Or, “Oh, my goodness — did you know that?” And then we always have some conversation around it, sometimes longer than others, never forced, but it inserts some topic that we would’ve never brought up. For example, and I still remember this one — I think I posted it to my Instagram because it blew my mind — every time you shuffle a deck of cards, you get a combination that’s never existed before. And I was like, “That’s crazy.” But if I did think about 52 factorial, I know that’s a large number. That was something that we ended up talking about, about decks of cards, shuffling, the concept of factorial and what that means. It’s not some deep conversation, but it lasts a few minutes and it’s always a nice family moment.
This is the other one I have multiples of. And I have to say, I’m proud that one of my most fashionable friends recently asked me, “What shirt is that? Great basic, I need that.” All my friends know I need all the guidance on clothing — now that I go to more public events. It’s always one of my friends or my co-founder, Erica, who sends me a dress, and they’re like, “This is perfect.” And “No, Becky, don’t actually wear that together. Doesn’t look good.” And so the fact that one of my most fashionable friends, who gives me the most guidance, now has multiples of these shirts — I claim pride. Honestly, these shirts are so cozy and they’re good hanging around the house with sweatpants. They’re good if you throw them on with leggings, they’re good with jeans. If you had to go to your kids’, I don’t know, lacrosse game and then go out to dinner, they’re good. They fit, they’re comfortable. I feel like they help me really cut down on clothing decisions, which is what I like in the morning. I can just grab one and I’m done.
I’ve always been a fan of setting my coffee the night before, but I was at a friend’s house who had a pour-over and I was like, “Oh, I’ve always been intimidated by those. What is that?” She was saying that she appreciated the act of actually having this slow moment for herself in the morning. It’s not so automated. She’s not scrolling on her phone, she’s pouring her coffee. And I really love good coffee. For both of those reasons, I thought, Okay, let me try this. Now, I might measure out my coffee the night before, but actually boiling the water and standing there feels almost meditative. I’m a person who moves a lot. I can have trouble slowing down, but this feels like a nice morning reminder, not only taking care of myself, but of doing something more slowly than it has to be done, that being probably a good thing in my life.
I was at a friend’s house and she had a ton of these almost in place of where I would anticipate a coffee mug. I was up really early and made coffee alone and I wasn’t about to ask her, “Hey, do you have mugs?” So I just grabbed one of these and then I realized, “Oh, this is amazing.” It keeps my coffee hot the whole time, but not scalding hot. And I love the feeling of holding the mug and it not having a handle. There’s something about the cupping of it that feels warm and cozy. Then I ordered one for my own house, and this is part of my coffee routine. I haven’t had my morning coffee in my home in a regular mug ever since.
For the past two years, we’ve built this online library in our Good Inside membership. We have videos, workshops, and scripts. At the same time, we know parents are busy and they need something in a moment that’s personalized to them. The Good Inside app is a really big shift from what our membership was before in that it gives parents instant access to exactly what they need at the exact moment they need it. As a parent, I don’t want to search for something. I want to tell you my kid’s age. I want to tell you what I’m dealing with, and I want you to tell me what to do every day. I don’t want to make decisions. And that is all. For example, imagine it’s bedtime and you have a kid who’s resisting bedtime and you’re exhausted. In that moment, you can use the Good Inside chatbot to get an exact script for your 4-year-old. Now you can respond from a place of sturdiness, not frustration, and you go to bed feeling like a million bucks instead of feeling like you’re regretting your last interaction.
I actually use the Good Inside app myself every single day. My kids don’t have Dr. Becky as a parent; they have Becky as a parent. And just like any other parent, I am human. I struggle. I forget things. I get triggered. I need to be refreshed with ideas I once learned and then totally forgot because I got busy. The app gives me that instant access and the dose that I need to stay on track. There might be a big problem that I have to figure out. But day to day, I also want to know what I should do to build my kids’ resilience and help them be confident. I want to be able to look back when my kids are out of my house and say, “I really do feel proud of how I showed up most of the time.”
[Editor’s note: The Good Inside app is free to download, with in-app purchases. A 3-month membership plan starts at $84.]
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