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Have you ever seen memorabilia with “Best Grandma in the World on it?” We have, and we immediately associate it with Jennifer Van den Hoek. Jennifer is an Australian, living in The Netherlands- an expat far away from home. Her story begins about twenty years ago, when she moved with her husband and four children.
Imagine moving miles away from home in the late 90’s, “ Communication was a little difficult and certainly very expensive.” For anyone who remembers, this is when the dial up connection had started picking up ( who can forget that sound!) Internet and long distance phone calls were expensive, “ The fax machine became our friend,” it was the only way to get news around instantly, especially for expats. Through the years, two of Jennifer’s children embraced the expat life and stayed back in the Netherlands while two moved back to Australia. Fast forward to 2016, where there’s no excuse not to keep in touch. Social media, email and mobile phones make it near impossible to stay away from family. 20 years later, Jennifer has just gotten news that she is becoming a grandmother soon!
The only problem- her pregnant daughter Jessica resides in Australia, while 2 of the other siblings live in Amsterdam.To add to the distance factor that expats face, pregnant Jessica lives far away from all her relatives- her closest relative is 2 hours away. The closest relatives being the baby’s aunt great grandmothers. Jennifer had a task: to connect her new grandson to the great grandparents.
She found that the best way to connect the great grandmothers to their new great grand baby was through pictures, so they could see his growth. But sending pictures through messages on the phone wouldn’t cut it for the great grand mothers. Images needed to be seen on a physical, big device, like a digital photo frame. That’s when she hit gold, she found the Nixplay Seed through thewirecutter.com. Her criteria for choosing the Nixplay frame was the number and quality of reviews. As a test, she decided to ask for the Nixplay frame as a birthday gift for herself. She loved it, she says,” I truly love my frame and each and every morning as I enter the living room, it lights up with (mostly) photos of the smiling face of Sebastian my grandson and photos of the latest and greatest adventures of my 2 daughters in Australia!”
Seeing how well the frame connected Jennifer to her family, her son in law decided to buy one for his mother too. The family grew from one Nixplay frame, to five! A whole expat family of Nixplay! “We feel so connected through these photos and other members of the family don’t seem so far away when they can see what is going on, on the other side of the world. The brothers often ask if there are any new photos lately.”
Nixplay frames are wifi enabled digital photo frames. You can send images using your mobile, email or social media straight to your frames. The best part about Nixplay is that each member in your family should have one! With the Nixplay app you can create playlists to send to multiple frames. There’s a “friends” option where your friends and family can directly send photos to your frame. “ I also very much enjoy the convenience of the Nixplay app on my phone so I can put photos in files or delete them easily from the frame. I also can easily bring up the photos, on my phone to show others when I am away from home .”
Jennifer has found the perfect gifts from expats and is gifting two frames to her mother and mother in law and she’s excited to hear, “the sounds of delight once my mother and mother-in-law receive their frames and start receiving photos from their children and (many) grandchildren … they will once again feel connected over such great distances.” While we do not sell our frames in Australia, Jennifer is a testament of a great, loyal, expat customer. She bought the frames in Holland and then took them with her to Australia, where she bought an Australian adapter to be able to use the frame there. She is truly a dedicated grandmother, daughter and mother and we are proud to have her as a customer. You too, can bring your family closer by gifting them Nixplay digital photo frames this Christmas.
Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.
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