Good thing I’m on a diet

You know that scene in Caddyshack where a kid throws a Baby Ruth candy bar into the pool and gradually people in the water start to notice it and Jaws music is playing and the people scream and scramble out of the water like they’re fleeing a great white shark? Well, last night the same thing happened except that it was our bathtub, there were two kids in it, and it wasn’t a candy bar. The real thing.

The main lesson to be learned from this psychologically-scarring experience: Always verify the status of the Number 2 situation before attempting a bath. We hadn’t had this happen to us in the 3.3 years that we’ve had children and we (and by “we” I mean not me) were a bit too quick to get the kids away from the dinner table and into the bath. After Jason took them upstairs, I called the babysitter (I was out of the house yesterday when she ended her shift) to find out how the day went. I now realize that just as she was telling me No, the kids didn’t poop all day, one of them was in fact taking care of business in the bathtub. I started heading upstairs, and as I approached the door I heard Jason saying “We need to get out of the tub! We need to get out of the tub! E!!” I entered to find both kids standing on the bathmat and the tub littered with bath toys and at the bottom, a poop.

I couldn’t even move for a good ten seconds… Who did it, and did they still need to go more? Our son upon (urgent yet blame-free) questioning said he did it, so I tried to get him to sit on the potty but that just made him upset. The baby just held onto my leg. Finally Jason got the kids in the shower and washed them each several times. I dealt with the mess, threw out most of the bath toys, the bath mat, and scrubbed the tub repeatedly.

In the end, I’m 95% sure it was the baby, for reasons I won’t get into. Plus while I was putting our son to bed, I asked him again who had pooped in the bathtub, and this time he said his sister did it. We were careful at all times not to sound too agitated — the kids even had fun in the shower — so I don’t think he had any motivation to lie. After the kids went to bed I cleaned and disinfected some more, and the bathroom is now spotless and according to the labels, 99.999% germ free. You could even eat in there, although it will be a long time before I ever look at a candybar again.

Posted by Erin 10.Jan.08 Parenting Read more Comments (2)

Inflationary Incentives

We’ve been potty training our son for several months, an experience that has made us question our parenting skills and inability to outwit a 3-year-old. Initially we started out following an approach that allowed two weeks for practice, then advocated a kind of cold-turkey stance: underwear only (except when sleeping) and no reminders to Go Potty. If he has an accident, very calmly let him stay wet for a bit and then get the child to undress himself. No rewards, no panic ever. What we didn’t expect was that our son had no problem staying wet, and no interest in undressing himself. So what was supposed to remove the control issue over whether or not he has to go potty, turned into major battles over him staying in the bathroom and taking off wet clothes. Nightmarish scenario for two germophobic (yes, urine is sterile but it’s still gross) type-A parents with a 1-year-old toddling around. (I’ll note here that his pre-school does not do diapers, and we’re all happy with the school so switching programs is not an option.)

After several long days of no progress whatsoever (it’s supposed to take 3 accidents before they decide, wait a second, it’s a whole lot easier to just go sit on the potty) and near-flooding of our house with pee, we switched to offering M&M’s as a reward. I wasn’t even sure he would like them since he’d never had one. No worries there. Pretty quickly the price of poop went up to 5 M&M’s, so realistically each time he did a number 2, he’d get 6, as he figured out himself. I was excited that he could do basic math, so I didn’t argue. A couple of months later, however, he would still show very little interest in telling us when he had to go to the bathroom.

I was worried about our seeming lack of progress, so I asked our pediatrician about it, and he reassured me that 3 to 3.5 years old is normal for boys, and once he decides he’s ready, it’ll happen. He advised against any pressure other than encouragement and rewards, and suggested stickers, which for his own child was all the motivation he needed to take over the potty training himself. So I bought stickers, made a chart, and showed it to our son and said when he fills it out, we’d go to the hobby farm and ride a pony. He was excited by this and seemed to understand the idea of having a goal.

I thought for sure this was the tipping point, and now with the incentives properly in place, we would simply respond to our son’s requests to go potty and be on time for all of our outings. I was wrong. There is definitely less drama, thankfully, but we’re still a ways away, and he doesn’t seem that motivated to fill out the chart. I have caught myself offering him an additional M&M for getting off the potty quickly and not requiring a story, and giving in to a request (demand?) for M&M’s in addition to stickers. I’m hoping he’s potty trained before we get to the point where I’m offering the pony itself.

Posted by Erin 08.Nov.07 Parenting Read more Comments (2)

Stuck at the top

We’re two days away from a big launch, and it feels like it did back in March. Not quite as nerve-wracking, but I’m starting to get butterflies and having trouble not obsessively checking the site and my email every few minutes.

Thankfully, the weekend arrived and forced us to get away from the office for a while to take the kids out. We went to one of those temporary pumpkin patches that pop up on El Camino, the ones that will in two months’ time turn into suburban Christmas tree farms. For us, the attraction wasn’t so much the pumpkins but the bounce houses. Last week we visited one that had 5 different bounce houses, and the price of admission was only $8 for a half hour - plus the baby gets in free. I don’t see how they can make enough money - the energy cost for those bounce houses has to be pretty high, and there never seem to be very many people there. Of course, we don’t go at peak times. This morning we showed up at 10am, and the tarp covering the ground was wet from last night’s rain. The guy who runs the place told us that he had wiped down the bounce houses prior to deflating them last night, but the water seeps in once you blow them back up. Sure enough, if you looked at the seams of the jumpers, there was water bubbling in through every crack.

The water made the younger one kind of nervous, but our son still had a blast running around and jumping. He spent most of his time at the bottom of one of those giant slides, jumping around and watching the older boys climb the stairs and slide down. He would occasionally make an attempt at scaling the steps, then change his mind after 10 feet or so. Finally he plucked up enough courage when there wasn’t anyone else around, and made it all the way to the top. At which point he started calling out for one of us to come up and get him. We waited a while, calling encouragement to him, but he just kept pacing back and forth at the top of the slide. He was so far we couldn’t actually hear what he was saying, but we got the meaning. The pumpkin patch rules prohibit parents from getting on the slide so we had to send the guy manning the checkin to go rescue him. You could see the expression on our son’s face as this friendly stranger made his way up the steps, from wary curiosity to hell no, get away from me! The man did succeed in getting them both down the slide, to the cheers of now a small crowd. On the way home in the car, we just told him how brave he was for climbing up the big slide. Maybe next time he’ll decide to come down on his own.

Posted by Erin 13.Oct.07 Parenting Read more Comments (0)

Nanny search resumes

We’re back to interviewing nannies again. Having been through 2 nannies in the past couple of years and interviewed dozens more, I’m not terribly thrilled about hiring a new one. I know there are great nannies out there — it’s just that they seem to already work for my friends. At least with us working out of the house, I’ll be able to keep close tabs on what’s going on. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled with that.

Hiring a new nanny is kind of like dating. You learn from each breakup more about what you’re looking for, and how to discern the canned answer from the genuine response. I made an offer to a nanny two weeks ago, which she was very pleased to accept until we reached a breaking point in the negotiations. She did not want to work when the kids were sick, and I didn’t see the point in having a nanny if there wasn’t someone to watch them when they’re sick, which is almost every other day from November to March. On top of that, she expected to be paid anyway, and not out of accrued personal time.

This week we had another candidate work three days with us, and I was about to make her an offer when she told me this morning that she doesn’t think she can work for us as much as we need. Now I’m trying to figure out how to patch together enough childcare between two sitters, but worrying about so much disruption to the children’s routines, and feeling extremely frustrated by this process.

When I get to the point where I’m ready to give up, I have to remember that at at least with Ballhype, I have a very flexible schedule which gives me more time with our kids than most working parents get, and that was one of the objectives of this project in the first place.

Posted by Erin 08.Oct.07 Parenting Read more Comments (0)

Division of Labor

For me one of the hard parts about deciding to stay home after having a baby was knowing that I would be reinforcing traditional gender roles. This is coming from a person who normally doesn’t mind cooking or cleaning and certainly loves being the primary caregiver for our two small children. Don’t get me wrong - I wouldn’t change a thing and am grateful that we have the choice in the first place. And now with Ballhype, I don’t have to worry about that part of my brain going soft or dealing with a gap in my resume.

Our son’s view of the normal state of the Gurney household is that Daddy works (now upstairs) and that Mommy takes care of him and his sister. Never mind that Jason makes considerable effort to spend quality time with the kids or that I work on Ballhype when they’re asleep. Our children have no idea that I do anything other than take care of them. That’s fine — they’re 2.5 years old and 10 months old, after all. Tonight, however, I was trying to wash our son’s face as he looked at a book and he twisted away and said, “Mommy … [pause while he tried to think of something to distract me] clean kitchen!” I laughed, but it made me realize that after things settle down a bit after launch, we really do need to mix up more of the jobs around here.

Posted by Erin 29.Mar.07 Parenting, Relationship Read more Comments (0)

Overheard

If I were at a “real” office, I wouldn’t be able to work and listen to my son on the monitor at the same time. He went down for his nap almost 2 hours ago, but he’s been talking and singing non-stop. Partial transcript: My mommy. No, MY mommy! My mommy. No, MY mommy! … Yellow, baby (quote from Cars). Amarillo, yellow. Amarillo, yellow. Verde green. Verde green. Azul blue, azul blue. Rojo red. Rojo red. Anaranjado. Anaranjado! … Adam, Corolla… Adam, Corolla…

Tonight’s going to be fun…

Posted by Erin 26.Mar.07 Parenting Read more Comments (0)

Working Relationship

I haven’t yet written about what it’s like to work with my husband. Mostly, it’s fun. I’d say that 97% of the time, we get along just fine due to the following reasons (more on the remaining 3% later):

However, being together in the same house now 24×7 with two kids 2 years old and under does present challenges. We have to remember to carve out time for the two of us that is not related to work. So far we don’t do this enough. We were going to schedule a date night every other week but at the most we’ve managed to take a break and watch a half hour of TV twice in the last month. Our Tivo is running out of room to save any more unwatched Daily Shows and Colbert Reports. But we do have a babysitter lined up for this Friday’s Warriors-Wizards game — combining our first night out with our first feet-on-the-street marketing event! We made up some baseball-style trading cards to hand out.

The other big issue right now is that our son has figured out that Daddy is upstairs and if he cries loud enough, he’ll eventually come down. No slight to Jason, but this behavior is driven equally by wanting one-on-one attention from anyone and wanting Daddy in particular. So we’ve got a bad cycle going here — Jason isn’t used to hearing the kids cry very much and therefore responds too quickly, and our son is crying more than he used to because he gets a reaction. The good news is that Jason and I have talked about the need to nip this early before it becomes established habit, and I think given a couple more days, we’ll all be comfortable with the new routine.

I will admit that while I enjoy working on Ballhype more than any other (paid) job I’ve ever had, there are times when I’m really tired, or wish that we could just be like *normal* people and eat dinner, put the kids to bed, and watch a movie or sit around and talk. And if I’m cleaning up at such a moment and Jason is back at the computer, then a fleeting thought crosses my mind: Did he ask me to do this start-up with him so that I couldn’t complain about him working all the time?

Posted by Erin 17.Mar.07 Parenting, Relationship Read more Comments (0)

What Happens in Vegas Happens without Us

Tonight Jason was supposed to make his annual pilgrimage to Vegas for March Madness, but late yesterday he decided not to go. The number of features and bug fixes remaining is going to require every waking and non-waking minute of the next three weeks until launch. And as more beta users sign on, more feedback comes in. This would seem an easy decision to make - get your business off the ground, or go to Vegas - but for the following: Jason’s last day at his old job was yesterday, a buddy had scored a free suite at the Venetian, and the airfare was cheap and nonrefundable. So right up until yesterday he was still planning on going but taking the laptop (those who are skeptical that he would actually work while in Vegas do not know the guy). But is it worse not to go to Vegas, or to go and be stressed out by not not going to Vegas?

Turns out it was the right decision. Our 2-year-old developed a fever that by 2AM hit 104 degrees and had me convinced he was about to die of bacterial meningitis. Not the case, thankfully, but we ended up talking to a nurse on the phone at 3 in the morning about every possible symptom and condition, including, “Has he been in contact recently with any lizards, snakes or other reptiles?” Answer, yes! He actually touched a snake last week at preschool when Lizzie the Lizard Lady brought in her menagerie for the kids to touch. (When he told me he had pet a “ake” I assumed that one of us had the wrong animal in mind.) To get back to the point - our son will be fine but is sick, so better for all of us to have one extra parent around the next couple of days to dispense baby tylenol and watered-down pedialyte on demand.

We’ve been debating for some time now about when to open Ballhype up to the public, and whether we should go from closed beta to open beta and then launch, or just launch. As the marketer, I am of course oblivious to the reality of how much development work and testing are required to launch a public, scalable application, and so my position in these discussions has been that we need to get out there before (yet) another competitor does. Jason is more conservative and realistic because… well, because he’s doing most of the work.

The outcome? We’re putting a stake in the ground to time the launch with the opening day of baseball season.

Posted by Erin 14.Mar.07 Beta, Parenting Read more Comments (2)