The Playpen: A Family Play Space Built for Real Schedules
Last Updated on 25 August, 2026
How Jen Wiedrick built a flexible indoor play center in Macedon, NY — and chose WellnessLiving to replace a fragmented booking stack.
She Had a Business Plan. Then Reality Happened.
Jen Wiedrick opened The Playpen in October 2024. She had a plan. Then families started showing up.
“I have my business plan, and…about 80% of it just totally got thrown out the window.”
That kind of honesty defines how Jen runs The Playpen. She listens to what families need and adapts. The result is a play center in Macedon, New York that serves real family schedules — not idealized ones.
The Playpen occupies 2,000 square feet at 1205 Mayberry Place. It serves kids ages 1 to 10. The staff are CPR certified, background-checked, and trained in child development. The Playpen is not a licensed daycare or preschool. It’s a recreational play center where parents can choose to stay or step away, depending on what their day looks like.
A Model Built Around the Parent
Most play spaces offer one format. The Playpen offers five, each designed for a different family need.
- Stay & Play is open play where a child attends with an adult. Sessions run 30 minutes, 1 hour, 90 minutes, or 2 hours.
- Drop & Go is childcare-style: parents can leave for 1, 2, or 3 hours during operating windows.
- Date Night drop-offs give parents an evening out.
- Play Camps run seasonally.
- Party & Play handles birthday celebrations, with a deposit upfront and optional add-ons at checkout.
Playpen Prep is a structured toddler program for ages 2–4. Before and After School care runs during the school year. Field trips bring groups in from outside. Sensory haircut events bring families with sensory-sensitive children into a familiar, safe space. The range is broad because the community’s needs are broad.
Nearly 950 child clients are part of the Playpen community. That number reflects trust built quickly and a model that gives families real flexibility.
Why Jen Chose WellnessLiving
Running The Playpen meant running three tools at once. Ticket Tailor handled event ticketing. A project management platform tracked sales manually. Each week, Jen moved sales data by hand so she could track sales tax, customers, and emails.
“I used to transfer all my sales from TicketTailor into Monday.com manually.”
That patchwork worked at the start. As the business grew, the cost (in time and consistency) became clear. Parents had to fill out the same forms on repeat visits. Packages were sold as informal punch cards. The after-school program and Playpen Prep were invoiced by hand each week.
WellnessLiving brought the key pieces into one place: parent-child relationships, booking, payments, digital waivers, package tracking, and client records. Waivers attach to a child’s profile and carry forward. Parents stop filling out the same form at every visit.
Jen also needed the platform to speak her language. Software terms like “classes” do not map to how The Playpen works. WellnessLiving lets her rename booking tabs so parents see “Party & Play” or “Stay & Play” rather than generic labels. That detail matters when your customers are busy parents who need to navigate a booking system quickly.
What Jen Is Building
When Jen opened The Playpen, she was manually moving sales data between three platforms every week. Birthday deposits were tracked in spreadsheets. Returning families filled out the same intake form each visit. The work behind the scenes did not match the warmth in front.
What she is building now closes that gap. The booking flow reflects how the business actually runs. Waivers carry forward. Packages auto-renew. Jen spends less time managing systems and more time in the room with the families who keep coming back.
The Playpen is what happens when a founder builds from reality rather than theory. Macedon is better for it.
Want to see more of their journey? You can follow them on Facebook!
Want to see what WellnessLiving’s automated tools can do for your indoor playground or small business? Book a free, no-commitment demo today and meet our AI front desk agent, CAASI.
