Start here. Grow far.

Selfish mommy

Have you ever had one of those days where you give, give, give, give, give? You give to your kids, to your husband, to your pets, to your job. You drive to school, to the doctor's office, to client meetings, to school pick-up, to after-school programs, back to the doctor's office, to the pharmacy, to home. You can't recall a single moment of the day you spent doing something for yourself (other than going to the bathroom, and really that's just a feature of the human experience not a benefit, so it DOES NOT COUNT).

And then you finally get both kids in bed and you crank out one last hour of work before sitting down to watch your DVR'ed episode of Brothers and Sisters (Enough snickering. You know you watch it too.) before heading to bed for your nightly 4.5 hours of sleep and your child starts coughing uncontrollably, is it completely selfish to think to yourself, "SHUT UP ALREADY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!"? 

Yeah, I thought so.

The privilege of parenting

I'm reading a novel in which one of the characters, a young(ish) mother of two in her (mid-to-late) 30s is dying of cancer and has two small children. There are long, lovely descriptions of how she spends her last weeks and days with her children: how she reads to them, sings to them, comforts them, prepares them. Her biggest agony as she faces her losing battle with cancer is that she will miss so much in her children's lives. It's more than she can bear. As a reader, and especially as a mother, reading it was almost more than I could bear. At least once I found myself crying into my hot bath while I immersed myself in this tragic tale.

If I'm honest, that's one of my absolute biggest fears since becoming a parent: that I will die and leave my children motherless. 

My concerns are partly selfish: I want to get to watch my kids grow up and become people. I want to be in their lives and witness their brilliance and their failures, their loves and their struggles. I want to impart them with my wisdom (Aw, shush! I do have some wisdom lurking deep inside me somewhere.). I want to be the one to help them solve their problems and celebrate their every joy.

But my worries are also selfless. Since my children entered my life I shed my self-centered, party-hopping ways and wrapped myself instead in the cloak of motherhood. My strongest and most primal urge now as a human being is to protect and care for my children at all costs. It is an impossibility to imagine being unable to protect them, to teach them, to guide them and cushion them as they bounce their way innocently through life.

But it's amidst these dreary worries of my potential premature departure that day-to-day life with kids interrupts. Raising children is often frustrating, always exhausting, and way more difficult than I ever imagined it could be. Of course it's beautiful and funny and poignant too. Still, it's easy to forget that when your son is throwing scrambled eggs across the room while your daughter shrieks she hates you because she can't have another piece of Halloween candy, the dishes are still dirty, the phone is ringing off the hook, you're about to miss a major work deadline, and you have to pee so badly that you're about to wet yourself. 

It's during those frantic, frenetic, hysterical times, when I want to run screaming out of my house and never look back, that I need to be reminded the most---by books, by life, by my own children and their preciously infuriating ways---that parenting is a privilege, that my time with them is not always guaranteed. So I stop. I imagine how different things could be for them, for me, if we weren't busy making each other crazy. I take three deep breaths (because, really, I just don't have time for five) and I give thanks that I'm still on this wild ride called parenthood. It's good to remember that there is nowhere else I'd rather be.

Mompreneurs, Part 2: Transforming Your Idea Into a Viable, Successful Product, by Dacia Napier, owner of Baby Potential

Read Part One here. 

So, I’ve assembled the team:

Texas Creative---website, general help. Allison---ideas, investment. Elizabeth---lawyer,investment. Jeannie---nanny, general help, sweat equity. 

All team members have contributions to make and all believe in the concept.That's key---get people or businesses who believe in your idea and who are supportive. Negativity is not helpful. 

That’s not to say that you need “yes” people. But you do need people who agree with your principles and values and who believe in your base concept. We all meet too many people in our lives who drag you down. I have come to believe that life is too short. We have to maximize our contribution and not waste time with small-minded, petty people. OK---enough soap box. Back to work!

So we had the idea---career patches on onesies and tees---that's really as far as we have gotten so far in this tale. Texas Creative fielded several freelance artists and I had my sister-in-law do some initial artwork too. We knew what we wanted: contemporary, vibrant, simple graphics to convey each selected career name without needing a lot of interpretation. So for rocket scientist we have a rocket ship emblem; for biologist we have a cute little collection of colorful cells---you get the idea. If you look at our web site, Baby Potential, you can see everything we created.

Once we got a couple of the ideas down, Texas Creative’s art team--lead by Josh Norman---took the concept and ran with it. Next we needed someone to screen-print our designs onto patches and then embroider the patches directly onto the onesies and t-shirts. Some questioned why we didn’t just screen-print directly onto the fabric. Why spend time and extra money embroidering the patches onto the onesies and tees? Well, it was part of our initial concept and we thought it looked better. Also, we could put the patches on any color background. 

We started with white onesies, but we always planned to add colored onesies and tees eventually. That’s another point---even though you may have a simple idea be sure to think it through, even into the future. Where can the idea take you? What is the furthest you can take it?  It doesn’t mean you have to go there, but it's a good idea to explore those options and see if you can incorporate some simple things into the project in the beginning that will allow you to progress without going backwards first. 

For us, we tried to keep things open. For our "lawyer" patch the design also allowed us to use similar careers on other onesies like, "judge," "supreme court justice," etc. Each patch could be used for several careers if the public interest existed. 

We had a hard time finding anyone who could handle both screen-printing and embroidery but eventually, we did---American Classic. We had them do our initial 12 patches and we got them down just right! Were we done? No! Our next step was to sell them and here's where we ran into another hurdle. We had no knowledge of how to begin our sales process.

Thankfully, I have a great friend who has been giving me advice all along. Ellen Cotton owns THE baby store in town, Sugarplum Dreams (check out their website too!). She took me to market in Dallas to see what I was up against: pricing, packaging, etc., everything we needed to know to compete against and learn from the big players. It was very daunting to say the least, but I saw and learned so much that it was a fabulous opportunity. I went on this trip before we'd gone through our final production so we didn’t have great samples to show, just concepts. I got some positive responses and made contacts for possible business. 

Another point: take whatever help you can get even though it may not be what you need at the time. I didn’t really need store contacts when I had a concept, but I sure did when I had final product. After we had product I contacted some of those market stores. No one picked us up at the time, but I got great feedback. 

They didn’t want all-white (which was all we had) and they said our price was too high. I really think the cost did us in. As a result of the production in the U.S. we had to increase the price. Also, with small runs of items, the price goes up. As you know the retailers have to have their margin and the store at market or sales people you use have to have their markup too and you still have to at least cover your cost! Add all those layers and boom, you have an expensive onesie that very few people want to buy even if the idea is great!

Still, we forged ahead. Ellen was wonderful and let us host an opening in her store. Allison’s sister, Lisa, also had a party at her house so we could show our product to our friends. That all went really well and we had some sales. But we really thought we could do more. In fact, I had always had my eye on Target. I thought our concept, colors, and contemporary design would fit right in with their stores.

Up next in Part Three, Juggling: Trying to Balance the Demands of Being a Wife, Mother, Doctor and Mompreneur all at once.

The H1N1 vaccine: will your child get it?

At least once each day I hear about either an unfortunate child or adult death from the swine flu or media coverage discussing the deaths. Following that information, of course, is the recommendation that we all get our children vaccinated to prevent them from getting and spreading H1N1. 

Coming from a parent who's son is on an alternative vaccine schedule, it probably sounds strange to hear that I'm on the fence about this vaccine. But both of my kids get their annual flu vaccine (thimerosal-free, of course). If I trust that vaccine, why should this one be any different? 

Reports (from who? from where? I'm not sure - just "media reports" I've heard lately) declare this vaccine to be as safe as any other flu vaccine. The flu vaccine is, as MSNBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman commented recently, "A condo." She said we should think of the H1N1 vaccine as the same condo but with different furniture (where the furniture is the strain of flu this vaccine is supposed to help prevent). Sounds good, right? Makes me want to trust that the manufacturer just took out their old "flu shot" recipe and dropped in a new ingredient; pork, if you will. 

But then I read that popular TV doc, Dr. Oz's wife and children won't be getting the vaccine: 

 Even Dr. Oz, host of “The Dr. Oz Show” said, in a recent CNN interview, his wife and children would not be getting the vaccine. 

Perhaps that article was a bit misleading, though. According to another site that interviewed Dr. Oz: 

 "I don't want to make a commitment on that until we see the final data," Dr. Oz told News 4 WOAI.

Which means he is withholding judgment rather than deciding not to get his family vaccinated at all. In fact our own pediatrician, a many who is completely gung-ho about vaccines in general and only tolerates my alternative vaccine schedule for my son, said nearly the same thing: he plans to review the research and, if it shows what he thinks it will show, he'll get his young child vaccinated too. 

The jury I'm on is still out. I'd like to read more, learn more and just have a better gut feeling about injecting my children with this vaccine. Both of their cousins have had what was suspected to be the swine flu and it was a mild illness that ran its course in about 3 days. Of course there is no way to know how my own children will react to H1N1 should they contract it so that is a bit of a fear factor and something that pushes me to consider this vaccine. 

So tell me, will your child receive the H1N1 vaccine?

Online Surveys & Market Research

[photo credit: SXC]

Mompreneurs, Part 1: The birth and nurturing of your business idea, by Dacia Napier, owner of Baby Potential

So, you have an idea. But usually you let your wild ideas go. Someone else has already done it, or you don’t have the time, or maybe it’s not good enough. You come up with multiple reasons to give up on it and all of them are valid. But once in a long while you have one idea, a gem of an idea, that you think might actually work. So what do you do? 

I asked myself that same question and it wasn’t even my idea initially. My aunt used to hand embroider onesies with the names of careers on the front. I thought it was such a good idea that I suggested she sell them. She wasn’t keen on the idea, so I asked her if I could take it on. OK. Honesty time here. This is usually where I stop with my grand ideas. The next day after inspiration strikes I forget about it or too many other things get in the way. Not this time. This time I went for it.

I figured I needed a website, someone to make the career patches, blank onesies, someone to embroider the patches to the onesies and then I'd go from there. I also thought this would be a great way to involve the community. What if we could teach underprivileged women to sew? They could sew the career patches onto the onesies from home and they wouldn’t need to find child care or leave their kids to go to work--two of the major difficulties facing underprivileged women with children who need to find work outside the home.

I started to see this as more of a cause. We could promote education and give back to educational programs! Sure, these were lofty goals, but back to the nuts and bolts. 

How do you actually take that idea--career onesies--and make it happen? I started searching on the Internet for blank onesies without tags. It's amazing what you can find. There are all different options available. Sometimes you have to try different search terms to get to all of the different options, but if you are reading this you're already a Google/Bing pro. 

Next I had to figure out how much to order and here is where I made a big mistake. I should have just bought a few onesies to conduct initial testing. But, because the price per onesie goes down when you purchase a higher quantity, I bought too many. But, mistakes will be made. And I've learned from mine.

Meanwhile I hired a great design agency, Texas Creative, to help me with a website. How did I find them? I asked people in the community to recommend talented designers. I also told these people my idea and they loved it! It's always good to bounce your ideas off of a lot of people you trust. Be careful who you share your ideas with, though. You don’t want them taking your clever idea now that you've finally got a good one. Texas Creative came up with an award winning logo! 

But before the logo was designed I needed a name for my product/company. I asked many people what we should name this fledgling idea and my nanny came up with Baby Potential and we ran with it. Are you seeing the theme here? I involved lots of smart, talented people to help me take my idea forward. In the beginning I wasn't a huge part of this--just the director and the person moving forward with the idea. I've had lots of help. 

Next I decided I needed some help with a business plan so I got my friend, Allison Zeller, to join me and then another friend, Elizabeth Boddy, wanted to help so she joined our project too! 

Up next in Part Two, Production: Transforming Your Idea Into a Viable, Successful Product.

Just me and my mom and...my gun?

My four-year-old daughter and I were reading one of her favorite books last night, Just Me and My Mom. In this story a child and his mother (full disclosure: the kid is actually some kind of rodent, a critter to be exact) take the train to enjoy adventures in the big city. One of the stops they make is a museum of history where the young critter dons American Indian garb he grabbed from a statue. In his hand is a bow and arrow. 

And it was then that our nightly story-reading ritual took a strange turn into the land of teachable moments, a land with which I'm not nearly as acquainted as I should be.

"I use that to get the bad guys too!" my preschool daughter said, pointing at the bow and arrow.

"Get the bad guys?" I asked. "What do you mean? When?"

"When I'm on the playground. But sometimes I use a gun to get 'em."

Up until this point we'd never discussed guns or what they are or what they can do. This was a first and one I hadn't prepared myself in advance to experience (you'd think my long-toiling, four-year stint as a mother would have had me at the ready with a neat and tidy answer but I was dumbstruck.

"Um, a gun?" I asked with trepidation. "Do you know what a gun is?"

"Yeah," she replied. You shoot it. It gets the bad guys. It feels like a shot but it can never come out."

Where in the hell did she hear that? I wondered. Sure, she watches TV but it's always PBS or Noggin (sorry, NickJr...still having trouble accepting that brand adjustment) and unless I've missed a few episodes Dora, Olivia, Toot and Puddle usually ain't packin'.

Her comment led to an in-depth---well, as in-depth as you can get with a tired preschooler whose eyes rolled back into her head 20 seconds into the conversation---talk about what guns are, how they can hurt (and yes, even kill) people and how if she ever sees a gun she should never, under any circumstances, touch it (she should find an adult and tell them where the gun is).

Was that the right way to handle the topic? Was it the best way? I may never know. But it brought the topic of guns out into the open and now it won't be a a strange thing for us (OK, me) to talk about again.

Have you talked to your kids about guns? How old were they? What did you tell them?

Who knew an innocent book about a rat (porcupine? nutria?) could lead to this?

Intimacy with a stranger

My husband gave me a spa gift certificate for Valentine's Day. I recently used it for a massage--SIX MONTHS LATER. I once heard someone say that a spa gift certificate is the best gift you can give a mother. Another person nearby overheard and said that a spa gift certificate complete with a booked appointment and a babysitter scheduled so the mother could actually use the gift certificate was an even better gift. Amen to that!

"When was your last massage?" the masseuse asked.

"Um. Maybe two years ago?" I replied, slightly embarrassed to admit that it had been that long.

As she rubbed and prodded my tight, stressed-out flesh I started to feel emotionally overwhelmed. I rarely take time out just for me (hell, it took me six months to find time for this appointment). Surrounded by silence and pampered by someone I'd never met I gave in and slowed down. And the firm, therapeutic strokes to my overtired, under exercised body made me realize how desperately I needed the break.

Laying on that table, face down with a slightly stuffy nose, I had an epiphany. I haven't taken care of myself in a very long time. The cluster of knots being untangled on my back were proof of that. While immersing myself in family, work and home I'd lost something along the way. I'd become a stranger to myself.

In the span of that one, rejuvenating hour I relaxed for the first time in so many months. My mind cleared and I visualized how I'd lost myself over the last year while adding a second child and a second job to my already overwhelmed life. I knew then that it would be vital for me to consciously find a way back to myself. I owe myself as much care and comfort as I provide to my children and husband every day. I deserve time for yoga and exercise. I am worthy of a massage every now and then. 

And in that quiet, intimate setting I began to reintroduce myself to me.

[photo credit: SXC]