Turnpike Tikes

Ronda Kaysen

Ronda Kaysen is Turnpike Tikes. Speaking in the third person, just because.

When Ronda moved to Montclair from Brooklyn with her husband and a toddler, she had no idea how to entertain her energetic tot. She looked for a website that could recommend great places to go — places that someone had actually visited — and also tell her where to get lunch while she was out and about. When she couldn’t find anything that fit the bill, she started her own site. And so began Turnpike Tikes. And then she decided to up and add another baby to the mix and discovered that prancing around Northern New Jersey with two little ones is a whole new ball game.

Ronda is a freelance reporter who writes regularly about parenting issues and just about everything else. She writes about New Jersey for Reuters, real estate for the New York Times and has also written for Parenting magazine, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Momlogic.com, Babble.com, ParentDish.com, The Huffington Post and Architectural Record.

She got her start at The New York Observer, where she wrote a column about Manhattan neighborhoods and had a brief stint in Mexico City where she covered art, architecture and the trials and tribulations of being pregnant in a foreign land.