When my daughter was a baby, she was in Australia and I was overseas. Visa complications kept me from getting to her. Bedtime was a phone call, or it didn't happen.
So I tried reading to her on FaceTime. Anyone who has tried it knows how that goes. She was too little to hold a phone steady. The pages came through small and blurry. Whatever I pointed the camera at, we lost the other thing.
Then she got older, and it turned around. She wanted to read to me.
That is the part I didn't expect. It breaks in both directions. We did years of bedtime like that, in two stretches, through a screen the size of my hand.
I live in Australia now. I'm a separated dad. My girls are with me in the evenings and all weekend, and their baby brother is only a few months old, still too little to come along. By the time he wants a bedtime story, I'll be reading to him too, whichever house he's sleeping in that night.
StoryLink is the app I needed on all of those nights. You start a video call, pick a book, and it opens on both screens, big and clear. You turn the page, their page turns. You can see their face the whole time, because the book isn't fighting the camera any more. And it works whichever way round it is: you reading to them, or them reading to you. You just read. That part is free, and it's free at their end too.
If a distance does bedtime in your family, whether that's a roster, a posting, a border or two homes, this was built for you, by someone who's been on the wrong side of all of it.
Before any of this, there was my grandmother.
We called her Achchi. She told me stories long before I could read them myself, and she is where all of these stories really started.
She passed away on 27 July 2026.