The kids and I just got back from a fabulous beach vacation in South Padre, TX with some friends of mine. This was the first time I had ever been to a Texas beach and I’ve lived in Texas for a very, very long time. It was a really nice beach…certainly not better than the beaches I’ve seen in Cancun or Cozumel but perfect nonetheless for this week long trip.
We had a blast! We even made it to the small Schlitterbahn park there. I’ve mentioned Sandy Blanchard in several of my posts in the past. She’s the one that takes those fabulous nature/flower pictures that I use in my posts sometimes. To the left is a picture of our feet in the sand. 
They also have two kids and our kids had a great time playing together. I’ve known them for almost 18 years now and there’s something about hanging out with people who know you, that makes things so easy. You can mostly be who you are and we can all laugh about ‘way back when’ before kids. I met Sandy’s husband, Jay, at a company we interned at back in the summer between our junior and senior years in college. They were high school sweethearts and still dating at the time. I remember laughing a lot with that group of interns and Jay always tried to pull one over on me with his ‘underwear sticking to walls’ apartment mess, but I got him good a time or two. Plus he reminded me he had to help me take my car to get fixed about 5 times that summer. It was a used car my dad had given me that turned out to be a lemon and turned me off of ever buying a Volkswagen. Sandy chaperoned us when I beat him at a drinking game at Bennigan’s restaurant (he’ll deny this one) and at a jalapeno eating game in another restaurant in front of his parents and my mom (he doesn’t deny this one).
On this trip, he and the boys were driving in one car and Sandy and I and the girls were in another. As we were pulling up to border patrol on our way back, he all of a sudden gets on the walkie talkie and starts saying things like “Aruni, make sure you throw that weed out the window right now. You don’t want to get caught.“ I laughed and said something like “Oh no. I’m throwing it out the back window right now and you better hope they aren’t tapping into this wireless channel or we’ll all go to jail.“ Fortunately, they weren’t tapping the lines, but they did ask us if we were US citizens and I had to tell them I wasn’t born in the US but I was a naturalized citizen, and that the crazy dude behind us had my son in his car. Of course Jay told me later he told the patrol guy he had no idea who we were. Then because we were laughing at our narrow escape, I had to play “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith and blast it through the walkie talkie so he could hear it. The walkie talkies on occasion made us sound like the teachers did on Charlie Brown and Jay would go around saying “wah, wogh, wao”…guess you just had to have been there. 
But back to the ocean, there is just something about the sound and motion of the waves that help put things in perspective. Seeing all the seashells and grains of sand reminded me of how we live in a blip of time and in a hundred years most of us will have been forgotten. Yet we stress and live like everything is so important when most big things in life are out of our control except for those things that are. We make choices every day and we choose whether or not to live a mediocre life and as Seth Godin, my favorite entrepreneurial, marketing blogger just posted:
Along the way, we settle.
We settle for something not quite right, or an outfit that isn’t our best look, or a job that doesn’t quite maximize our talents. We settle for relationships that don’t give us joy, or a website that’s, “good enough.”
The only way to get mediocre is one step at a time.
You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make every day.
I’ve heard that the fear of public speaking is one of the top fears in the world. According to Speech Topics Help, Advice & Ideas the top fears are:
1. Fear of public speaking (Glossophobia)
2. Fear of death (Necrophobia)
3. Fear of spiders (Arachnophobia)
4. Fear of darkness (Achluophobia, Scotophobia or Myctophobia)
5. Fear of heights (Acrophobia)
6. Fear of people or social situations (Sociophobia)
7. Fear of flying (Aerophobia)
8. Fear of open spaces(Agoraphobia)
9. Fear of thunder and lightning(Brontophobia)
10. Fear of confined spaces(Claustrophobia)
So it’s amazing to me how little kids pull of their year end school performances. I was so proud of my two kids this weekend. They had their year end performances this past Saturday. They go to the same international school so they both got up in front of a crowd of tons of parents and kids at the University of Texas at Austin JJ Pickle Center and sang songs, acted out skits, and read poems in French, Spanish, and English!
Both of our kids in the early days seemed to always have a meltdown when they performed. Our son went to Montessori school and invariably he would freak out, not say a word, or get pissed off. Of course it was quite embarrassing for us parents plus we felt bad for him. Our daughter did the same thing. She would be totally fine before the performance but then all of a sudden when she saw the crowd of people she would shut down and get shy and embarrassed. She would then cry afterward because she felt she had let us down. Of course we would hug them and tell them they did a great job and it’s OK to get nervous sometimes.
But this time was different. They both preformed and sang with gusto! I was so proud of them.
It’s funny how these performances bring back the memories of when I performed as a kid. I’ve probably blocked out some occasions, but I do remember totally blanking on what came next in one of my piano recitals. I think I even forgot words during a voice recital. I felt horrible and completely embarrassed for days. I can’t remember what my mother said to me but I probably didn’t hear anything over my internal dialogue of ‘you are such a loser.’ But for some insane reason, I kept on trying different things. I guess it’s sort of like getting back on that horse after they buck you off (which happened to me quite a few times - once I even broke my arm in a horse riding incident). The fear is still there but each time you get a little bit more used to it.
The same is true for trying new things in business and life. Sure you get hurt and bucked off from time to time, but you have to get back on and try different things. No sense in beating your head against the same wall and getting the same undesired result. You should try beating it at a slightly different angle or just get off the horse and try a different one.
Anyway, I’m thrilled they did so well and had a good time. Our daughter rewarded us by getting sick today. Hopefully she’s better by tomorrow. Maybe if she watches enough Dora the Explorer she’ll be peachy keen by tomorrow…one can only hope!
I hope all of you other parents out there survived your school’s year end performances!
Everyone has heard the word passion. It’s written about in business books, in fiction books, in poems, in romance novels, etc.. It’s shown on TV and in the movies when people find their true loves or their calling in life. But what is it? In the world of entrepreneurship, people tell you in order to be successful you must be passionate about what you are doing. I’ve run into a lot of people who appear passionate about what they are doing but they don’t always succeed in the way they expected. Passion ebbs and flows in most everything in life. Sometimes you are in love with your business and sometimes you aren’t, but in order to survive like Microsoft, Dell, Apple, etc. the passion must be there, the underlying love for your products, people, and company must be there and the gaps between must not be long.
They say true passion can be traced back to childhood, when everything seemed possible. My son is passionate about soccer and hanging out with his good buddies. If it was up to him, he’d be kicking around a soccer ball all day long. I often have to tell him not to kick the soccer ball in the main part of the house. If we’d let him, he’d probably sleep with his soccer ball. If you mention one of his friend’s names, he will incessantly ask us when we are going to see him next. He’s a bit of a socialite like his mom.
I can’t tell what my daughter is passionate about yet, but I think she has an affinity for music and lip gloss. We have a keyboard in our house that my father gave us and she tends to gravitate to it and punch the keys from time to time. And she likes to play the bowling game on the Wii.
My husband is passionate about starting the multi-lingual, international Magellan School here in Austin. He is passionate about his kids learning Spanish since he is fluent in Spanish and wants them to have the gift of multiple languages that was given to him. He is also passionate about biking and exercising. He set a goal to do the Shiner Bash - 100 mile ride and he did it. He exercises every day and he says he’s in the best shape he’s ever been in his life.
What a blessing it must be to discover your passion and find yourself being able to realize your goals. It’s even better when you can make a living at it. It seems like most people can’t turn their passion into making a living for whatever reasons whether it be timing, market acceptance, encouragement, money, health, ability, skills, etc. Many people try to keep their passion alive on the side or after some time, we forget what it was we were passionate about.
Right now in my life, I’m most passionate about my kids. I am passionate about helping people achieve more than they thought they could. When I look back upon my childhood, I remember the passion I had for music. I think my father actually started taking us to piano lessons when I was about 9 years old when we lived in Albuquerque, NM. When we moved to Lubbock, TX , I sought out my own piano teacher who lived nearby and I would walk to her house for lessons. It was hard to find time to practice and hard to find time to continue since it was just me, my mom, and my sister. My grandmother studied piano in Oxford University in England so I must get some of my passion for music from her. Sadly, I can’t play the piano today, but I can sing.
I sang in church and actually did a solo in front of the entire church in my early teens. I sang in high school choir. I sought out my own voice teacher and when I went to college at UT Austin, I took voice courses for two semesters. I knew I was reasonably good, but not great. I never envisioned myself singing in a musical or singing opera so I guess I thought what’s the point and continued on with my business degree. In grad school I sang a few songs in a couple of bands.
I also remembered that I liked to write. In my early teens, a few girlfriends and I would start this notebook with a story and each of us would have to write the next part until we ended up with a full story. I hate to admit this, but I think Michael Jackson and his glove showed up a time or two in those stories. :-) I wonder what happened to those notebooks. I would also invariably get high grades in creativity in my English classes but very low grades in grammar. The concept of grammar didn’t click for me until my freshman English class in college for some reason.
I also didn’t have anyone around me encouraging me, connecting me with people, giving me feedback, or showing me the way to nurture those creative right brain activities I was drawn to. So I did what any respectable child of two doctors would do….I got an Accounting degree and then an MBA, which has served me well and odds are has resulted in a much more lucrative career than if I had pursued writing, singing or horse back riding (another younger days hobby of mine) as a career.
So now here I am in mid-life. Too old to start up regular horse back riding again for fear of breaking my bones…well not really, but not enough time to go to a barn and take care of a horse. It’s highly unlikely that I can make singing a financially rewarding career at this point in my life, but I am enjoying my voice lessons and relish any time I can make it to a jam session. I do enjoy writing in my blog.
So that leaves me to figure out how best to blend my passion for working with people, with a product I’m passionate about, with a path to millions of dollars….
Any suggestions? How did you discover your passion?
Sometimes the dots connect and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you connect them and a nice picture emerges. Sometimes you connect them and a mess shows up. Some seemingly random dots are showing up in my life right now and I’m not sure if and how I should connect them or if there is any connection at all. Here they are:
I recently received the new & improved purple peacock hat I mentioned that I wanted in my New Year’s Resolutions post that my good friend Julie Fergerson, VP of Emerging Technology at Debix, got me for my birthday. The one she got me was too big for my small head so I sent it back and the designer, Sharmon Hardin, created me a new one that fits great and even has peacock feathers! She was so friendly and easy to communicate with. Every hat someone buys from her she makes another for St. Jude’s. I think I’m going to submit Sharmon and her hat business for inclusion in Seth Godin’s new book. Now I have to wear it to lunch with my friend one day!
My daughter made me a beautiful bracelet for Mother’s Day that I wore to work yesterday and got many compliments on. Of course, I was shoving it in people’s face to look at it so they were forced to say how pretty it was whether they liked it or not. But it is quite lovely. I’ve been noticing her personality starting to show more. Sometimes when she says something, I’m taken aback at her sophistication and the signs that she’s growing up. I smile at her confidence and beauty. She’s starting to drop her baby words but I still tell her she needs to get her ’swim soup’ when she’s going swimming. She had so many cute words that will probably hang around in our family’s vocabulary forever. I used to come up with words when I couldn’t say something properly and my mother still reminds me of those or says them in sentences when she’s talking to me. I had words for elephant (my favorite animal), apple, sweet things, etc.
My son made me a wonderful card with a picture that he drew of himself on the front and he wrote “I love you mommy” in French inside the card. I have it on my desk at work and several people have remarked how cute they thought it was. The only word I remember that he used to say was ‘mimi’ for milk otherwise he seemed to pretty much learn a word and say it right.
Our roof was damaged in a recent hail storm and even with insurance coverage it will cost us $3 to $4K out of pocket.
My husband’s car was practically totaled by the hail storm with windows blown out and body damage that will also put us out of pocket some money. The windows are fixed so he can drive it but he still has dents all over his car. His car is jinxed because so many things have happened to it.
Interesting opportunities are presenting themselves for me and Babble Soft making me wonder how I should deal with them.
I’ve had a surge of creativity recently around writing song lyrics, singing, and writing in general but no consistent time and space to get it out. It’s all bottled up and I feel sometimes like I’m literally going to explode. I’ve never experienced this before, but it’s a form of torture (not water boarding). I also don’t generally hang around people who get that or who I can share what I’ve been able to write, which makes me a little sad sometimes. It helps that I work in weekly voice lessons over lunch. We are working towards recording a few songs for demo purposes. I tell my voice instructor that I consider our lessons therapy sessions!
I am tired from burning the candle at both ends as they say. The whole Building A Web Business After Hours is taking it’s toll. I’m home sick today just feeling worn out with a scratchy throat. The upset tummy has disappeared for now. I will hopefully be fine tomorrow.
The new school, The Magellan School, that my husband is founding is going really well and set to open this August 2009. Many families have already signed up and donations are coming in. The first years are always challenging so it’s going to be tight around here for a while.
There’s a bunch of other dots that I either can’t write about or I’ve forgotten but needless to say I am living in interesting times and it’s seems like it’s exactly where I’m meant to be to deal with what lies ahead…
How about your dots?
I try to mix my parenting and business posts here on entrepreMusings. Of late I feel like I’ve been doing more parenting related posts, but I just couldn’t pass this one up. This morning as I was getting the kids ready for swim classes and soccer, my 6 year old son said the most brilliant thing! We have a busy day today as I’ll be taking them both to my daughter’s swim class, then to my son’s soccer game, and then later back for his swim class. Then we are heading out so they can see their dad finish the Shiner 100 mile bike race later this afternoon. It’s two hours from Austin so I’m sure they will both take naps in the car. [UPDATE: It ended up being a 5 hour roundtrip because I didn't have the right directions.]
Anyway, my son was getting dressed for soccer, and he wasn’t sure what shirt to bring. Sometimes they wear a black one and sometimes they wear a white one. I told him why don’t you bring both just in case and then all of a sudden out of the blue he said “You are so smart mommy!“ I said “Really?“ He said, “Yes you are so smart to think of bringing both of them.“ I was like “Wow, thank you sweetie. I’m so glad you think I’m smart.“ I gave him a huge hug and kiss and told him “I hope you still think that when you are 12 or 13 years old.“ He looked at me and said something like, “If I’m still playing soccer and you tell me to bring both shirts, you will be smart.“ We both laughed and my daughter laughed along with us.
He then couldn’t find his shirts and was looking in the wrong drawer and I told him to look in the other one and there they were. He looked at me in disbelief and happiness that I found his shirts and again said “You are so smart!“ I was smiling from ear to ear and gave him another squeeze and tickle. He was truly being genuine and he learned that I responded positively the first time so I thought he was quite brilliant to say it again so soon. He’s picking up quick that when mom is happy, life is easier and he’s more likely to get to play the Wii.
I didn’t understand why people said boys have their moms wrapped around their fingers until I had a son. My daughter has me wrapped too. The wrapping loosens a bit when they whine but when they say and do brilliant things and when they flash their adorable smiles or are peacefully sleeping, it gets wrapped so tight it squeezes my heart and takes my breath away…
I took my son to soccer practice today and his sister, of course, wanted to come too. After getting both of them into the car, I realized I forgot something inside the house so I went back inside. On the kitchen floor I saw dirt from his soccer shoes and some chocolate from one of those Quaker Oats chocolate chip granola bars he had just finished eating as a snack. At first I thought it was all dirt but upon closer inspection I discovered the piece of chocolate. I found it amusing for some reason. I picked the pieces up and threw them in the trash and found myself smiling as I walked back out the door.
I guess I wondered how often we think the chocolate in our lives and businesses is dirt and how often we percieve the dirt as chocolate. But there they are side by side and both get thrown away because they are on the floor. I think I did try to eat dirt a time or two when I was a kid. I was quite the tom boy. I certainly do love chocolate. I also thought how funny in his boyish ways he dropped a piece of the favorite part of the granola bar on the floor without realizing it next to the dirt that came off of his soccer shoes. I’m not sure why I found it funny but probably because it was just a symbol of his boyish enthusiasm and excitement about going to do something he loved to do - play soccer!
So while we were out in the blazing heat of the early evening, my daughter and I were sitting on a partly shaded big rock and then she started wandering around playing with another little boy. She was throwing rocks into some standing water with the little boy but sometime during this play time she found a little patch of little purple (my favorite color) flowers. She brings me one and said “This is for you mommy,” and I said “For me? How beautiful! Thank you sweetie.” Then she brings me another one and tells me I have to save them and put them in some water when we get home. I told her I didn’t think we had something small enough to hold them because they were really tiny little flowers. She said “uh huh!” and I said “OK.” A few minutes later the wind blew them off the rock and I couldn’t find them. I had to tell her that they blew away and she said “the wind?” I said “Yes, the wind blew them away.” She then profoundly said “Oh, OK.” Then she ran off to play.
So the point of this post is…well I guess there really isn’t one. But if I had to make one up maybe it has to do with…well heck I don’t know what it has to do about anything.
Today is the first day of Spring and it’s an absolutely gorgeous day here in Austin, Texas! Many of us seem to have Spring Fever at my day job. I remember when I taught entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Austin business school how hard it was to get the students to focus in the Spring semester. Everyone’s minds were wandering this way and that…which is partly the reason teaching in the Fall semester is much easier.
There is just something about Spring that evokes the strangest mix of feelings in all of us. So I left a little early today and came home to hang out with hubby and our daughter, who is off from school. When I came in she was taking a nap on the little futon sofa in the entry way to our house and she looked so adorable that I was compelled to lay down next to her and relish the warmness of her body. I lay there for a while looking outside the big bay window that faces our front yard. I watched the greening trees wave slightly against the blue lightly clouded sky. I heard and felt her breathing. The world was so peaceful and everything seemed just so right for that seemingly brief moment in time.
When she woke up, she turned to face me, smiled, and started looking into my eyes for a while…not saying anything. I looked straight back at her and smiled a big smile and told her how beautiful she was. She then asked me why my eyes were black. I asked her why hers were brown and she said “I don’t know.”
How blessed I am.
Yes, Spring has sprung.
Since I blog about parenting as well as business here on this oddly unusual and sometimes entertaining blog, here’s what happened this weekend.
The Reader
Last night (Saturday) hubby and I went on a date night. We decided, given the state of our financial situation, to do dinner & movie at The Alamo Drafthouse, where they serve dinner while you watch a movie and it doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg. Our original plan was to see the Academy Award winning picture, Slumdog Millionaire, but it was sold out. So we ended up seeing The Reader (check out this link for the trailer) starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, one of my favorite actors. Winslet won best actress for her performance in The Reader and we are both so busy that neither I nor my husband realized Fiennes was in that movie too!
I’ve actually had a long time fascination with Fiennes after his performance in Schindler’s List, despite the fact he played one of the really bad guys in that movie. He was equally as interesting in The English Patient. I was a bit annoyed at his performance in The Duchess, mostly because the character he played lacked depth and sensitivity, but after seeing The Reader I’m less annoyed. I told my husband this and he said something like “All Fiennes has to do is smile that little half smile and you see his piercing blue/gray eyes and he’s back in your favor.” Well maybe I added the blue/gray eyes part, but I had to smile and nod. He then told me that Kate Winslet did all of her own nude scenes (of which there were many in this movie), and I asked him how he knew this. He didn’t have a good answer other than he read it somewhere, but I could tell she did. I think it’s cool that she’s so comfortable with her body that she even risked displaying a couple of her stretch marks (a.k.a. badges of honor).
The story was set in Germany and starts out with a young 15 year old Fiennes (I don’t know the actor who played him, but he was adorable!) having a summer affair with a much older Winslett. She asked him to read her all the books he was reading in high school ranging from philosophy to mythology. He later finds himself a law student observing a trial about the Holocaust where she is a defendant. He is devastated because he had no idea she was involved in the Holocaust in any way and it deeply affected him and all of his future relationships with women. It was a pretty good, thought provoking movie, but I wasn’t too happy with the ending because I was hoping for more resolution. But I guess just like in real life there really never is a good resolution is there?
Zilker Kite Festival
This Sunday afternoon we tried to go to the Zilker Park Kite Festival. We were supposed to meet up with some friends there but after more than 1/2 an hour of driving around the area, not finding parking, and not even being able to figure out in a timely manner where the shuttle parking was, we gave up. Our friends were already there so after several calls and her telling me that it was chaos and she’d understand if we don’t come, we decided to bag it and take the kids to another park. We stopped at The Domain on the way so I could return something. Turns out the kids weren’t that interested in flying the kite so we hung out at the park for a little bit and then came home. Hubby and son threw the football around and our daughter rode her little bike. I threw the ball with our son for a little while, followed our daughter on her bike on the sidewalk for a little while, then washed some clothes, did some work on Babble Soft, and wrote this blog post.
Random Kid Stuff
Earlier today our 6 year old son asks our almost 4 year old daughter if she was in love with some boy named Steven (who is older than she is) at her school. Steven likes to give her a hug when we pick her up. She tells him “No, he’s mad.“ My son then asks her if she thought he was cute. I’m not sure she responded to that one. I laughed out loud because I thought how innocent that exchange was between them and how much meaning someone would apply to that exchange if they were teenagers or older.
Our son has made friends with an 8 year old girl at his school. She’s into PokeMon and Bakugan (these toys that change from a ball to a creature and back again) and he sometimes comes home with several little Bakugan toys that he says she gave to him. I asked him what he gives her and he says nothing, and I ask him how can that be? He said, she likes giving the little toys to him. I’ve told him that he must also give her some cards or toys back but he just says “But she likes giving things to me.” So, I’m not sure what to say to that, but I feel as if I need to coach him to also give her something. Well, at least he’s friends with a girl who seems to like sci-fi and typical boy stuff - just like his mama.
This weekend I completely spaced on my daughter’s swim class. Her class has been at 10:00 for the last 4 months but because of a few unexpected things that happened on Saturday morning (e.g., our house cleaner who comes every two weeks called in sick so I had to quickly start changing beds/washing sheets & towels and my husband was gone for activities surrounding the founding of The Magellan School) my mind somehow shifted into thinking the class was at 10:30.
We showed up at 10:30, and I wondered where the other kids in her class were when my son pointed through the window and said ‘there they are!‘ It still hadn’t hit me that I had gotten the time wrong and I walked in and the parents said ‘there you are‘ and in slow motion I said ‘did I miss the class?‘ and they all nodded. I was in shock because I’ve never done that before. I apologized profusely. I asked the teacher if she could just get in for a little bit but she had to go to her next class. One of the guy teachers who was nearby said he’d give her a mini-lesson and thankfully he spent about 20 minutes with her in the water. I almost cried on the spot out of gratitude and not having to wallow in guilt while she cried about not being able to swim. My son waited as patiently as he could on the other side of the window given that I had originally told him he could play a game on my new iPhone for a little while during her class. The teacher was so kind to her and gave her piggy back rides while taking her under water. She laughed and smiled. He called her ‘sweet pea‘ and ‘sweetie pie‘ and if he wasn’t in the water, I would have given him a big hug for making/saving my day! You can’t buy that kind of marketing and in that one instant, I wanted to tell everyone how amazing Emler Swim School is!
Well, last month I forgot to pay the mortgage or shall I say I remembered too late. I’ve never done that either so we had to suck it up and pay a late fee much to my chagrin. I can’t recall ever paying a late fee although I’m sure it’s happened at least once on something.
Oh and I didn’t win my longed for trip to Tobago mostly because I didn’t have the time or wasn’t able to come up with the right strategy in a timely manner to make it happen. Looking back, I think if I had taken off a week from my day job to make sure I won this week vacation, I would have won.
UPDATE: After finishing this blog post, I went to a yoga class. I got there only to realize I forgot my yoga mat (for the first time ever!) at home despite going back into the house before I left to get it and a towel. I had to rent a mat and let’s just say a rental mat offers a sub par experience to your own purple mat. My right ankle hurts a little bit now.
So needless to say these are signs that I have too much going on…some of which I’ve blogged about and some of which I haven’t and probably won’t. I’ve started to look at the things I can give up in my life and I’ve given up a couple of things so far. I gave up co-writing the series for the UT Alumni magazine and just last week I took a leave of absence from my weekly Blog Mastermind call with some amazing folks who I mentioned in the GigaOm article I did on finding a business parter online. It was a tough decision but they were all supportive and told me I was welcome back at any time. I’ve also started to unsubscribe from blogs, newsletters, etc. that I haven’t been reading anyway. I’m taking a long hard look at my life and trying to figure out what I can give up without giving up anything I really want/need to do.
I may need to give up some things temporarily while I sort things out and find a way to integrate them back into my life once I deal with some of the other things going on in my life, but how does one do this without risking making the wrong decisions? Sigh.
I wonder if we had a crystal ball if any of us would still in fact be able to make the perfect decision. So far, I feel like I’ve been extremely lucky in the decisions I have made in my life and although I certainly wish I could change a few things, I don’t have any big regrets.
Have you given up something and felt relieved? Have you given up something and later wished you hadn’t because you weren’t able to go back to doing it again? Or as my friend Robb just asked “What is the biggest thing you have ever given up on?” and my answer was “Myself.” But I usually pull myself out of it pretty quickly when I repeatedly realize that I am my own worst critic and at times my own best cheerleader…
That is what my kids kept saying every time we drove into our neighborhood during the Holidays and saw all the houses decorated with fabulous Christmas lights. “How come they have their whole roof lit up, a fire truck, 7 reindeer, and Santa all in their front yard?” was a constant refrain every time we drove home at night. “That’s not fair. They are luckier than we are!” they would say each time.
I tried to explain to them that just because people have a bunch of lights on the outside of their house during Christmas time doesn’t mean they are luckier and that we have no idea what was going on inside the houses. That explanation fell on deaf, young ears.
I also told our son that when he was old enough, he was more than welcome to hang up as many lights on the house as he’d like but until then mommy and daddy were just too tired (and frankly not interested). He thought that was a good idea. I’ve also thrown that logic on him when he doesn’t like what we are eating/cooking. So he’s going to have to do a lot of cooking and light hanging when he’s older. I’m guessing he’ll conveniently forget all of this when he’s about 10.
In previous years, just to keep slightly up with the Joneses, I found a North Pole candy cane light, some wooden stand-up Santa/reindeer thing, and some Santa singing lights (we turned off the music so as not to annoy the neighbors). Their dad wasn’t initially too fond of the candy cane light. But this year that wasn’t enough. They wanted more and better lights so this time he gave in to their whining and got some lights for our small bushes and hanging lights to put above our door. Of course we hung the door lights up about 2 days before Christmas and that seemed to appease them for a little while…until our son asked us why they didn’t get any gifts in their stockings. I told him that the gifts from us and Santa were just too big for the stockings and we didn’t want the stockings (that were hung up using scotch tape) to fall down. He didn’t buy that especially after going to my best friend’s house and their son told them about all the things he got in his stocking. I repeated my explanation and said “maybe next year you’ll get something in your stocking” until we put the stockings away and he stopped asking.
So the grass (or Christmas lighting) is always greener (brighter) on the other side as they say. And I keep thinking to myself “what if someone doesn’t like grass or Christmas lights and doesn’t want to pick sides?!”
Photo by Sandy Blanchard
Last year I made New Year resolutions despite not normally liking to do so. I even did a blog post called One Entrepreneur’s 2008 Goals. And guess what? Some of them came true and some of them didn’t. This year I’m not making any resolutions. I’m going to try to go more with the flow. Now that doesn’t mean I don’t have things I’d like to accomplish but I’m not going to make them goals.
Interestingly, I achieved all of my 2008 personal goals. I lost 5 lbs (actually I lost more like 8). I signed up for and took yoga as consistently as is possible with two kids and two jobs. The yoga helped me lose 5 lbs, the other 3 I lost due to stress and an ongoing existential crisis. I’m one of those people who doesn’t eat much and fidgets a lot when I get stressed. I know some people hate me for it, but let me tell you the elevated crazy brain activity more than overrides the weight loss benefit. I mean I don’t get as bad as seeing dead people, but I start saying and doing things that don’t make sense (at least to me), and I start making wild interpretations of other people’s actions (and non-actions) and words that probably don’t make sense but might and if they actually meant what I thought they meant, my world would be turned upside down. Yeah, don’t even try to understand that last sentence.
I even laughed more and that’s because my son is a budding comedian, and I work with some funny people at my day job. The only personal goal that I can’t say with 100% certainty I made significant progress in was “be less concerned with what other people think.” I made some progress, but the trauma of “what will they think of me if I wear a purple peacock hat to a lunch meeting?” still plagues me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve cared less but I’m waiting for that day I can walk into a room and say whatever is on my mind (well not whatever because it would shock the innocent) and not give a flying flip if people think I’m nuts, a crazy entrepreneur, or a hysterical brown woman because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that what I’m saying is actually wise, intelligible, actionable, and worthy to be said.
I really only knocked out of the park one of my Babble Soft business goals and that was to “find great people to help make it happen.” And that happened when Nicole Johnson joined me as VP of Product Development back in October. We are slowly but surely making things happen and it’s so amazing to have someone as great as she is along for the ride. We don’t know how it will all turn out yet given what’s going on in the world, but I feel honored to be working with such a talented, personable individual, who can fully relate to my life situation of a day job and two little kids!
The other business goals were thwarted by: the economy, my husband leaving his job to consult and start an amazing dual language immersion school called The Magellan School (i.e., hence the day job - health care benefits are very important when you have kids), having to unexpectedly pay a significant portion of my father-in-law’s triple bypass surgery expenses (yes, he was not insured), my mid-life crisis, and a random butterfly flapping its wings in China.
But you know what? Despite not making most of my business goals, life is great. All my close family and friends are healthy. My kids laugh and smile every day which makes me happy. I enjoy my day job because although I’m underpaid (working on changing that slightly), it’s probably the best place I can be to help build the Austin entrepreneurial community and ride out this economic downturn. Plus, I really like the people I work with. I’m a huge believer in fostering an amazing work culture and a positive work environment, and we currently have that at the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) and I have that with Nicole at Babble Soft. So yes, overall my life is pretty darned good.
So my non-resolutions for 2009 are to sing more, laugh more, write more, make more funny faces at my kids, be less repressed, empower people, unashamedly love people, continue to take yoga, find a purple hat (any suggestions?), make some life changing decisions (I already got my hair cut short), and move the ball forward one day at a time on Babble Soft and at ATI.
So no resolutions for me, but I do like to get shit done and I’m hoping our brand new President of the United States feels the same, and I think he does!
Oh, did I mention I plan to curse more too! For most of my adult and teenage life many of my friends (most of them guys) have tried to get me to curse more and I saw no need for it. Their jaws would drop on the rare instances I would curse, so I’ll see if I can work in more curse words into my daily (or weekly) discourse (mostly off the blog because I have a hard time writing curse words). It might be awkward at first, but I’ll suck it up and overcome the awkwardness just like Dooce and The Bloggess have been able to. They are some of the top cursing mommy bloggers on the Internet today and I cry laughing (or is that laugh crying?) whenever I read their posts. I mean go read: This is one of those posts about how you can make money off your blog but instead of money you get a coupon for a burrito and tell me you don’t start laughing your ass off. I’ll just have to remember not to curse in front of the kids… Sorry mom!
How’s that for some non-Resolutions?!!
And so 2008 comes to an end and the old saying ‘time flies’ is yet again reaffirmed. It seems to go faster with each passing year, especially with little kids jumping all over you, sucking your energy dry underfoot. Each year is a smaller fraction of our total lives. To our kids each day seems like an eternity full of laughter, playing, occasional tantrums, asking their parents for candy, and fun! And to us grown ups, the movie of our lives keeps going faster…slipping through our fingers….with fond and sometimes hard memories behind us and interesting times ahead.
So I’d like to thank all of you dear readers for joining me on my entrepreneurial parenting and business journeys. I haven’t spent much time trying to monetize my blog, and I don’t make much money from it. So your blog comments, your emails, your conversations, and your tweets mean so much to me! Most of us bloggers don’t blog for money, we blog to share ideas and to create conversations whether on or off the blog that might not have happened before.
My favorite form of compensation comes from those of you who comment directly on a particular blog post. The way to a blogger’s heart, after all, is through comments left on her blog.
But, I also very much enjoy the comments from those who recieve the free blog updates via email who simply hit ‘reply’ and let me know their thoughts. I get many replies on twitter, and I wish someone would figure out how to integrate tweet replies directly into the blog comments, but that hasn’t happened yet (as far as I know).
And then there are those of you who I talk to on the phone or see in the business community who mention they read my blog and mention a particular post. I’m often taken by surprise by who reads my blog and what their interpretations are of my posts. The people who know me well usually know how to read in between the lines, and I keep it fairly tame because my mother and my favorite aunt read my blog! I wouldn’t want to shock them too much.
Special thanks goes to my husband, Erin, (who I honestly don’t think really reads most of my blog posts or he might feel more compelled to comment on some of my snarkier ones) for making sure this blog works smoothly. He upgrades the blog when a new version comes out, he installs the latest/greatest WordPress plugins that help make this blog as effective as it can be, and helps troubleshoot any random technical glitches that occur. He is our resident rocket scientist, and I have yet to see a technical problem that he can’t figure out.
THANK YOU AGAIN DEAR READERS for enriching my life! Have a HAPPY, PROSPEROUS, and JOY-FILLED NEW YEAR!
During the holiday break, I’m trying to tie up some loose ends and one of those was completing my daughter’s first year baby album. She was born a couple of years before we released Baby Say Cheese otherwise I would have already had the pictures selected as each milestone occurred!
Her baby album has sat on our fancy, big, mostly unused dining room table for close to three years (removed for dinner guests and promptly replaced the next day). She will be 4 years old next year.
It has sat open, closed, or askew with pictures hanging in and out of it for years. I saw it often out of the corner of my eye and quickly switched my attention to other things. For those who know me, I usually don’t let things sit around undone but for some reason, I could never find the time to finish it. I would occasionally have a spurt of desire to complete it, would write some words, select some pictures, and ask my husband to print them. But quickly I would get distracted by something seemingly more important. And it sat there pulling me and repelling me at the same time.
We finished our son’s album just before our daughter was born which was 2 or so years after he was born, but that was mostly because his album is in Spanish and I don’t know Spanish. My sister decided to give us a Spanish baby album, so I had to nag, harass, make kind requests of their dad, who is fluent in Spanish, to finish the parts I couldn’t before our daughter was born.
Our daughter’s album is in English and on most days I know how to read and write English, but I had a baby album block…sort of like a writer’s block but it had a baby album slant to it. Several months ago, I came to the sudden realization that all my excuses of not having enough time, not being able to log in to my husband’s Mac to search iPhoto, not wanting to learn how to print pictures, and not wanting to deal with figuring out the dates of the pictures were masking my true feelings fears. And that fear had to do with closing a chapter in my life called ‘babyhood,’ despite not planning to (or wanting to) have any more babies. In my heart and eyes she will always be my baby girl but finishing her book puts finality to it and my heart is still adjusting to that feeling.
And it made me wonder about the other areas of my life where I might be doing the same thing. My fear of closing a chapter in my life and moving toward the unknown may be holding me back from discovering many unseen opportunities in business, my career, my life, or even my children’s lives. And I wondered if many other’s experience this sensation or if I’m the odd duck?
Oh, and just in case it wasn’t clear, I finished her album today…just a few short hours ago…and she helped me do it. I’m moving on to the next chapter of my life, and I’m thinking to myself “thank goodness there’s no such thing as a teenager album!” From what I hear, people like to forget those years.
The following is a guest post by a friend and fellow entrepreneur Julie Fergerson. We met several years ago while each of us was in the middle of our very own first high tech start-up. Julie is currently a VP at Debix. Debix provides services to help you monitor your credit. My husband and I signed up a while ago, and we recently signed up our kids. We were at her daughter’s 5 year old birthday party that she mentions below. We just got the results back for our kids who were part of a batch of 83 kids that were evaluated. Thank goodness our kids are safe but 3 of those kids had compromised credit. Check out Julie’s post below to learn more about how to protect your children’s identities.
Are Your Children’s Identities Safe?
Hi, my name is Julie and I am a mother of two little kids, age 2 and 5. I am also an executive at Debix, the Identity Protection Network, and have been chasing criminals and stopping fraud over the past decade. Recently, I helped design a new product to protect children’s identities. As usual with any new product launch (July 28th, 2008), I asked my friends at my daughter’s fifth birthday party to enroll and give me feedback on what they thought.
I was stunned to find that two of the fourteen children at the party (age 4 and age 9) had someone else using their identities. This hit so close to home that I decided to research the size of the problem.
So we scanned 500 children who were under the age of 18, and found that 1 in 20 kids (5%) already have someone else using their social security number. To put that in perspective, that means about one kid in every classroom in the US is a victim of identity theft. Worse yet, the average child victim had over $12,000 in debt and 12% of the child victims are age 5 and younger - shocking!
To ensure the results were accurate we hired Javelin Strategy and Research, a top-tier analyst firm to analyze the results and report their conclusions. You can download the research report here: www.debix.com/research.
You can hear stories from the parents about their children being victims at (http://news.debix.com/index.php/categories/child-victims/).
As I talk about this problem with other Moms, the first question is always, “what does it mean that their kid is a victim of identity theft?” It means the child will not be able to use his credit when he needs it for things as important as college loans, first apartments or even a first job. As part of my research I met Lindsey, a college student at Texas State, who is living this problem. When she applied for her first internship competing against 400 other candidates, she was thrilled when she got the job and received the company welcome gift. Unfortunately a few weeks later, she received a letter rescinding her job offer - she was told she was not hirable because someone else was using her social security number. After what she calls “a full time job” of working to clear her name for six months, she was able to restore her identity and get the job.
The next question I get is “how can this happen? Surely companies know the social security number belongs to a kid.” The answer is no. There is no system in place to warn companies and the Social Security Administration does not publish a database of social security numbers with names and ages of kids. The social security administration has a formula for issuing a social security number, but you can’t tell the difference between a number that was issued to a 39 year old immigrant to the US and a newborn. About all you can tell from the number is the year and location it was issued (check out SSA Algorithm for issuing SSNs.)
It is our job as parents to protect our children and give them every possible advantage when they become an adult. We have to protect our kids as best we can so when they start out they have a clean record and aren’t starting adult life at a disadvantage.
The solution I built at Debix finds the problems and restores the child’s identity for $20 per year. While we try to keep our pricing affordable, we also took the time to publish the steps a parent would need to do if they wanted to protect their kids on their own at www.childrenscreditcrisis.org.
I also worked with the FBI to produce a webcast to teach parents how to protect their kids from Identity Theft. Feel free to pass this information along.
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Do you have any stories to share about identity theft either from personal experience or a friend’s?
I haven’t written about politics on my blog for a variety of reasons but mostly because I think everyone has a right to their own opinion and my blog is primarily about business and parenting…not politics.
However, given that a historic, unprecedented event has just happened in our lifetime, I felt compelled to write this post. I am SO excited that Barack Obama was elected to be the next president of the United States! Not just because I agree with much of his political philosophy, but also because he’s brown, has brains, and has the potential to heal wounds created throughout the world.
If you are someone who has not grown up with brown skin, this might not make sense to you but in my opinion this is a huge affirmation of the American dream. My uncle, a geography professor, was turned away from a restaurant while visiting Virginia New Mexico because of the color of his skin. When I was 8 or 9 years old, a blonde little boy turned to me in the walkways outside my elementary school and yelled at me calling me the ‘n’ word. I had never heard that word before, yet I felt the hate emanating from this young boy, and I still remember the fear I felt standing there all alone wondering why this boy hated me so much.
I’m not even Black (I’m South Asian), but I (and other members of my family) were lumped into the non-White category. When I lived in West Texas, the difference was even more pronounced. I grew up self conscious of my skin color and even now I have moments where I wonder if I truly fit in…despite being married to a White man! Women and Black men have had to consistently work twice as hard and be twice as good to be recognized at the same level as White men in this country.
Time will tell if Obama was the right pick, but the fact that he was picked in this country in 2008 means to me that we’ve reached a turning point in our history. People who are not White and not even men (thanks to Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin) now have a living breathing example of how it can be done.
Obama, to me, epitomizes working hard (no riding daddy’s coattails), focusing on education, prioritizing family values, and taking a thoughtful analytic (that man is smart!) approach before acting. As an added bonus, he appears to know how to speak proper English!
Not only has he broken color barriers, he has broken social media barriers. He has run the biggest, first, and most effective political campaign that has ever been run (oh what money can buy)! By his campaign’s avid use of twitter, YouTube, blogs, MySpace, email campaigns, etc., he has single handedly affirmed an entire new industry and demonstrated how using the Internet and social media can have a huge impact on the success of campaigns, businesses, and causes. If there was any doubt by individuals and big companies as to the efficacy of social media, it has now been shattered!
I was 3 when I came to the United States with my parents, and we landed in Pennsylvania. I was 21 when I became a naturalized citizen in New Mexico. I am now many years older, live in Texas, and tonight I saw the window of opportunity open wider for my light brown kids…
God Bless America!
