You have prob­a­bly heard of the case when McDonald’s was sued by an elderly lady for suf­fer­ing a scald­ing burn from cof­fee bought at McDon­alds. She won and was awarded a total of $640,000 in dam­ages. It seems that McDon­alds gets hun­dreds of these kinds of com­plaints every year, some involv­ing children.

Now, a law­suit has recently been filed against a Texas restau­rant, alleg­ing that it is liable for burns suf­fered by nine-month-old baby boy Gabriel, who was vist­ing the restau­rant together with his fam­ily. A wait­ress placed a scald­ing hot cup of cof­fee directly in front of the child, who grabbed it and spilled it on him­self. Gabriel was rushed to the burn unit at a local hos­pi­tal for treatment.

I do warn you that the pic­ture of his injuries which are pub­lished on the page behind the link is no pretty sight — but a stark and graphic reminder how dan­ger­ous hot bev­er­ages are to chil­dren. No mat­ter where they are served. More on scald injuries here.

First and fore­most, I hope baby Gabriel will recover as soon as possible.

Sec­ondly — see­ing some­thing like this takes me back to my core dri­ver of my Mum­my­Mug project: to save chil­dren from the risk of scalds from hot drinks. No mat­ter if it hap­pens at home or in a restaurant.

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First an apol­ogy — as you will see, the menus and nav­i­ga­tion bars on mummymug.com are cur­rently scram­bled since a cou­ple of days.

This is all because of a Plug-In instal­la­tion spree, that I, as inno­cent stu­dent and enthu­si­as­tic begin­ner user of Word Press, went on last week.

You see, I thought I was in Plug In Par­adise when I last week realised could start freely ad all sorts of fea­tures to the blog, with­out engag­ing my web­site builder, and add use­ful fea­tures for shar­ing, tweet-feed, re-tweeeting etc. Great!!

With those words in the back of my head, I hap­pily down­loaded, acti­vated and deac­ti­vated until I thought I had found a good mix.

Well.…. I do believe many these Plu­g­Ins are use­ful, but I have learned my les­son now: be care­ful with what you choose. I did not realise they could con­flict with each other and with the sys­tem as such, and lit­er­ally put you out of business.

First the screen sud­denly went white.

Then I could not log into WP Admin at all any more.

Who after two days of work, my web sup­port has man­aged to unlock the admin access, but then we got a hos­tile takeover from some evil plu­gin that blocked the logo, then rearranged the entire menu.

But — so much for try­ing to do it your­self. It lead me straight from Plu­gIn Par­adise to Plu­gIn Pain any­way. I hope this word of warn­ing will keep some­one out there from mak­ing the same mistake!

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This week, one mil­lion kids aged 6 months to 4 years are get­ting vac­ci­nated against the H1N1 virus/swine flu/‘mexican flu’ in the Nether­lands. I believe the Nether­lands is pretty late in get­ting this done: Swe­den for instance is much fur­ther in the vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme. Usu­ally one would of course say bet­ter late than never, but as Eleonore already had the flu last week (and served me quite a Mom­pre­neur challenge/juggling act), I would rather say this one comes a lit­tle bit late for us.

In good Dutch order, it is not oblig­a­tory to have your kid vac­ci­nated, you may as a par­ent choose. I must admit I had sec­ond thoughts — not about the vac­cine itself, as I know many do, because I belong to the group who trust it is a wise thing to get vaccinated.

But I did have my sec­ond thoughts about sit­ting in the the assum­ingly mega-long queues to get the injec­tion, that I imag­ined undoubt­edly would have to be part of an oper­a­tion involv­ing vac­ci­na­tion of 1 mil­lion kids in 1 week. I mean, 1 mil­lion in one sin­gle week  — how could it otherwise??

But again, also in good Dutch order, if you choose to go along with the gov­ern­ment, you will be well taken care of. You bet­ter also do what they say, and exactly what they say: you bet­ter show up on the exact day, place and time allo­cated; indi­cated within a half hour slot, lest you go with­out. No sec­ond chance at your fam­ily doc­tors. The invi­ta­tion let­ter we got con­tained a full page of instruc­tions in tiny let­ters, where each postal code area was sorted on even and uneven house­num­bers — this was the way to trace ‘your’ slot. Be there or be square.

And — did it work or did it work! I think there were more per­son­nel than (ner­vous) kids and (even more ner­vous) par­ents at the large tent that had been put up in the Zuider­park in The Hague, which was our place to go to to get the injec­tion. Within less than 15 min­utes, we had parked, entered, reg­is­tered, found a nurse, sat through the painful sting, got­ten the reward (a col­or­ing pic­ture, suit­ably involv­ing a dinosaur and giant injec­tion nee­dle and lots of band aids — I assume to de-traumatise all the lit­tle ones by let­ting them colour it what­ever color after­wards),  and were out the door again. In fact — noth­ing but smiles all around, from all the staff, and mirac­u­lously (almost) from the kids, who seemed to sur­vive the expe­ri­ence just fine. Well done Holland.

And if you won­der — Eleonore did GREAT! She was so brave, I’m of course very proud ;-) But she did paint her dinosaur blue after­wards, and she did fill the injec­tion nee­dle next to him with imag­i­nary bright red blood, so I assume it was more scary than she wanted to show… !

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Yes­ter­day, we attended a sem­i­nar in Utrecht, organ­ised by CMS Derks Star Bus­man and WBI Web­ex­perts. I believe the 50 or so par­tic­i­pants which had taken the time to come, was an after­noon well spent.  The speak­ers included Mr Hoorne­man, Sienen and Hagen from CMS, and Tim Pel­lens from WSI.

The topic was social media, and we got a good and infor­ma­tive run­down from WSI on inter­net and social media trends, and the opti­mi­sa­tion of the vis­i­bil­ity and reach strat­egy within the ever-changing bat­tery of social media tools and plat­forms. A few inter­est­ing stats on inter­net use in the Nether­lands, that were new to me in any case:

• 12,2 mil­lion Dutchies (out of a total pop­u­la­tion of 16.6 mil­lion) are online at least 1 hour per day.
  
• The fastest grow­ing Dutch online pop­u­la­tion demo­graphic is women aged 20 — 40, and they engage increas­ingly in.… gam­ing!
• E-commerce cur­rently gen­er­ates 4 bil­lion € in annual sales in the Netherlands.
• Social net­work Hyves is gigan­tic in the Nether­lands, with around 6,7 mil­lion Dutch mem­bers. That is some­thing like  40 % of the entire pop­u­la­tion! Fastest grow­ing cat­e­gory is women between 30 and 50 years of age.

A large part of the dis­cus­sion revolved around the legal ins and outs of using social media for mar­ket­ing pur­poses. Per­haps not the sex­i­est top­ics to spend time on as a pas­sion­ate social media mar­ke­teer. But of course oh-so-important to be aware of: bet­ter to be safe than sorry and find your­self in court fac­ing a com­peti­tor suing your pants off because you used their trade mark name wrongly.

A few insights:

• There is a lot of legal buzz at the moment around the use of third party trade­marks in Google Adwords and as key­words online. The Euro­pean Court of Jus­tice has recently indi­cated that Google has the right to pro­pose and sell Adwords includ­ing 3rd party trade­marks. A French court, how­ever, recently fined eBay €80,000 for hav­ing used Dior as a key­word. This is clearly  jurispru­dence in the making.…
• A rule of thumb is, that you may use some­one else’s trade­mark in your blog or on your site, if it is for refer­ral, for [fair] com­par­a­tive adver­tise­ments and as long as it made abun­dantly clear that you do not sell or rep­re­sent the brand.
• The reg­is­tra­tion of a domain name in itself gives no auto­matic IP rights and is not com­pa­ra­ble to a trade­mark in the ‘offline’ world.  This said, you may of course not cyber­squat and reg­is­ter a domain name that already belongs to some­one else. So start in the right order: secure it by duly reg­is­ter­ing your trade­mark first.
• The new Dutch leg­is­la­tion on data pro­tec­tion, which amongst other things for­bids Dutch com­pa­nies to send any kind of email to cus­tomers or other com­pa­nies with­out prior explicit per­mis­sion to com­mu­ni­cate by email, is one of the strictest in the world. Hor­rey.…. it cer­tainly does not make life eas­ier when one wants to design mar­ket­ing cam­paigns., I can tell you that much. It also applies to Dutch com­pa­nies com­mu­ni­cat­ing with per­sons or com­pa­nies out­side of the Netherlands.

That a law­firm offers such a sem­i­nar for free is of course great ser­vice.  So — here­with my offi­cial thanks! I learned a lot!

It also goes to show that they believe, that there will be many com­pa­nies out there, includ­ing some of those present that day in the room, who are going to make mis­takes along the way and end up need­ing legal defence in this area. Or feel that they need to attack a com­peti­tor to defend their position.

And no doubt many of us will.… and hav­ing shown that they are a trusted hand to turn to if and when that hap­pens, I am sure they will end up earn­ing back the cost of speak­ers, hand­outs, pens, mini-mints and cof­fee, drinks and chips.

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Today, a large ad caught my eye in the morn­ing paper: A Store with a Story is Open — CLF Store in Amstelveen. It turns out to be the first ‘Child Labour Free Zone’ ini­tia­tive in the Netherlands.

The idea is as sim­ple as it is strong: make sure that your com­pany, store, school, niegh­bour­hood — how­ever you define your ‘zone’- does not sell or use prod­ucts that have come about through exploita­tion of child labour.

Of course child labour is some­thing that noone openly — or per­haps even con­sciously — would like to defend. Or pro­mote. But the sta­tis­tics speak for them­selves: there are a stag­ger­ing 218 mil­lion child labor­ers in the world, right now, in 2009: mean­ing that as many as 1 in 7 chil­dren aged 5 — 17 world­wide work instead of going to school! Let’s not be naive: we prob­a­bly all of us have more cloth­ing, shoes and other things in our house that  some of these kids made. Stuff we have smil­ingly picked up for a euro at a mega-sale, think­ing that we have made a bargain.

Turns out this is part of a major inter­na­tional project spon­sored by the ILO, EU, Alliance 2015 and  inter­na­tional NGOs such as Hives, Oxfam, Amnesty and Unicef, as well as NGOs in Inida. This ini­tia­tive is already around for years, to push for action, to make sure that com­pa­nies and con­sumers act in accor­dance with all these inter­na­tional con­ven­tions that world lead­ers have signed in the last decades, pro­claim­ing the inten­tion to ban child labour. And allow kids to spend their youth where they belon: in school.

Six EU Mem­ber states are listed on the site as hav­ing active projects. He! Six? This is where I start get­ting con­fused. Why not 27?? Why not some non-EU coun­tries also? I’m for instance com­pletely aston­ished to see that Swe­den is not on there. Or the UK. Why?? Can some­body enlighten me, please?

In the mean­time, I want to make a state­ment and a com­mit­ment here and now: the Mum­my­Mug™ will only ever be man­u­fac­tured by adults, who get a fair pay for their work. And we’ll do our utmost to con­trol any­one who deliv­ers input in our man­u­fac­tur­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion chain that they also have a clean record. 

If this is enough to offi­cially qual­ify as a CLF com­pany, I still have to find out. But I do hope that it means that also we may proudly carry this state­ment logo, and hope­fully also inspire other com­pa­nies up there to also rise to the challenge.

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06.32.
Luck­ily we wake up this morn­ing and note a good devel­op­ment: Eleonore’s fever down to a mere 37.2! She still coughs, she still has a throat so sore, that it actu­ally makes her cry in her sleep, poor thing. But still. Good sign! I was not that sur­prised, as she was sweat­ing pro­fusely a cou­ple of times dur­ing the night (of course I had been wak­ing up at every unex­pected sound she made, as the aware­ness that swine flu can cause sud­den breath­ing prob­lems has taken total hold of my unconscious).

07h30. Morn­ing rou­tine over. Includ­ing feed­ing Eleonore a cock­tail of Tam­i­flu, parac­eta­mol, vit­a­mines and cough drink. I feel slightly more awake after three — yes, no less — strong cof­fees with foamed milk.

07h40. We snug­gle up on the couch and watch the daily must-see show in the Nether­lands at this time of year (well — at least if you’re either 5 years of age or younger, or the par­ent of such a child): the Sin­terk­laasjour­naal.  The daily adven­tures, every year the same of course, of St Nicholas, that arrives to the Nether­lands from Spain on a real steamer around 17 Novem­ber with an army of cheer­ing and slightly stu­pid helpers, Zwarte Pieten, is greeted by the crowds in har­bours all over the Nether­lands. Lit­er­ally. Then Sint and his Pieten keep the kids in the coun­try in an iron grip until 5 Decem­ber, when it is time for presents. And every day in the mean­time, you’d bet­ter be pre­pared. Every evening, the shoe will be set at the fire­place, and sugar lumps and car­rots need to be placed in it, for Sint’s horse, Amerigo.…and in the morn­ing it bet­ter be filled with mini-gingercookies (‘peper­noten’) and a suited small gift. Or the sprout will be veeeery unhappy.  I know, because once, I for­got. Never hav­ing grown up with this tra­di­tion, how­ever, I for­gave myself (and could luck­ily blame the Sint…!)

07h30. Laundy Nr 1 in the wash­ing machine. 30 degrees. Of course. It works!

07h45. Com­puter on! Scan­ning through the emails that have arrived since 23h30, when I switched it off last night. Check out my Twit­ter mes­sages. I have two replies on one of my blog posts — in Russ­ian! Cool. I Google trans­late and reply. Find an inter­est­ing blog post by A Mod­ern Mother on [expat/bilingual] kids and their accents. Makes me smile. Fire off a quick com­ment — this com­mu­nity I’d be proud to become part of. 

9h05. Oups. Realise I have got­ten caught in emails, blogs and the rest and left the TV on a bit longer than planned. Eleonore does not seem to mind (sur­prise). I decide her fever is low enough that she can han­dle a real shower (last few days, the wash­ing has been some­what more lim­ited) includ­ing hair wash. She dis­agrees. I win. In the end she is clean. But must admit she screams louder.

09h25. Laun­dry Nr 1 in  dryer. Laun­dry Nr 2 in wash­ing machine.

9h30. Call the accoun­tant to make an appoint­ment for next week. We need to dis­cuss the monthly report­ing to the share­hold­ers, the new tax break that Dutch com­pa­nies will have as of 2010 on income gen­er­ated from patents (yes!!! we could qual­ify for a 5% cor­po­rate tax rate! incred­i­ble!), the reclaim of VAT paid in Ger­many dur­ing our par­tic­i­pa­tion in Kind&Jugend in Sep­tem­ber and some other bits and pieces.

9h45. Yes. Find a con­fir­ma­tion in my email of the arrange­ment of a major ship­ment out of Thai­land, that I’ve been try­ing to make hap­pen dur­ing the last week. 

10h30.  Eleonore takes the lead. She decides to turn the liv­ing room into a beauty salon. We curl her veeery straight and (to be bru­tally hon­est) rather thin hair. And she sur­prises me by being able to paint her nails — all by her­self, with total con­cen­tra­tion and no spillage. And in two colors!

10h55. Nose bleed alert! She gets them often, espe­cially when she is sick. Not very nice. But at least we know how to deal with it. After 15 min of care­ful nose pinch­ing, we’re both con­fi­dent it must be over — which it is.

11h12 A.M. My busi­ness part­ner Vik­tor is on the phone. I share with him some ideas I have after hav­ing read Crush It last night. Now, this one gives so much inspi­ra­tion that it will require a whole new blog post! Which I can’t write today — so keep check­ing in if you’re inter­ested to know my twist on this (because I do assume you have also read it?) ;-) 

11h13  Eleonore starts mak­ing presents for Amigo, Sin­ter Klaas’ horse. I cheer her on from the side­lines while talk­ing to Vik­tor. After I have hung up I help her wrap car­rots and sugar lumps in home-made gift paper and place them in the shoe by the stove — by the way, this year; she has cho­sen to use a 2 inch hot pink stiletto heal strap san­dal of mine. Hm. Last year, it was a rub­ber boot. Guess she is grow­ing up!

11h20 Laun­dry No 2 in dryer. Laun­dry No 3 in wash­ing machine. Hor­rey — last one for today!

11h30 Oh no. Thai part­ner calls to say that the local ship­ping agent has not been in touch as sched­uled. Gotta work the phone. Man­age to make sure ship­per has num­ber of con­tact per­son at the pickup address and vice versa. 

11h55 OK. Time for lunch. No small task as Eleonore basi­cally refuses to eat because of her throat pain. After try­ing every trick in the book, I do man­age to get her to eat a half a sandwich.

12h30. I decide for myself that Eleonore will not be eter­nally dam­aged from watch­ing another video. Espe­cially since we set­tle on a Swedish, veeeery edu­ca­tional one. That is at least mak­ing my con­scious a lit­tle lighter ;-) I snug­gle up next to her with com­puter on my lap.

13h06. Last laun­dry goes into the dryer.

13h08. Eleonore’s fever down to 36.7! Happy!!

13h10.  We start an ecclec­tic ver­sion of  our Winne de Pooh mem­ory board game, accord­ing to Eleonore Bru­tal Rules. I have no idea what the logic is, but hey, we spread out over the entire liv­ing room floor, I lose in the end (of course) but we both have fun!

13h38.  The mail arrives. I recieve some impor­tant doc­u­men­ta­tion about the progress of our trade mark reg­is­tra­tion in Japan — it is through! Mum­my­Mug™ is ready to roll and con­quer Tokyo! I also sit down to do some bank­ing errands. I love inter­net bank­ing. I pay my salary taxes, some pend­ing invoices and shift money between some com­pany accounts.  All done in less than 10 mins.

13h50. Eleonore comes up with a brill idea: let’s make a home video! Well — what the heck. Why not! I start charg­ing the bat­tery for the cam­era, is it has been in a drawer for a while. I start to feel that my lit­tle girl is really see­ing the end of the flu, she has her energy back.

13h53.  While the bat­tery charges, I return a call to a man­ager at ABN Amro Infor­mal Invest­ment Ser­vices in Ams­ter­dam. He’s asked me to speak at an event next week for start­ing entre­pre­neurs at Delft Uni­ver­sity. Of course most hon­ored to be invited — my sec­ond speak­ing engagement! 

14h15 Empty the dish­washer and clean up in the kitchen. I hear Eleonore talk­ing to her­self as she is invent­ing her own games in her room. Seems she is turn­ing the doll house into a sta­ble. I really enjoy hear­ing her a bit ener­getic and happy again.

14h42Viktor calls to debrief on progress in dis­cus­sions with a poten­tial major dis­trib­u­tor. Good news ! We are slowly but surely sync-ing, which is a really awe­some per­spec­tive. Me happy ;-) 

15h15. Eleonore runs out of steam very sud­denly, and wants PANCAKES — NOW! Luck­ily there is still a pack of pan­cake meal in the cup­board, because shop­ping is not pos­si­ble today. No leav­ing the house with this flu.

15h30. We engage with heart and soul — as always — in the pan­cake adven­ture. Home video idea long for­got­ten. Eleonore also decides to make a side dish: a home­made soup of water, salt, pep­per and some other spices she gets her hands on. Really fun — until it spills ocer her hand and stings her badly, she had a lit­tle wound on the fin­ger. Oh dear. We eat pan­cakes on the couch while the tears stream down her cheeks.

15h55. Time for another video. Don’t feel guilty this time, it is about all that she can man­age. She clearly needs a cud­dle, so I snug­gle up next to her on the couch with the com­puter on my lap/ I watch Snowwhite with one eye (to be able to grab her hand when it gest scary) and start typ­ing away.

17h00. Oh dear. it takes 30 mins to con­vince her to take that last dose of Tam­i­flu. Glad this is over!

18h00. Din­ner

18h30. Early night for the lit­tle one. She surely needs the sleep.

So. That was my day. Seam­less or schit­zofrenic — what do you think??  Admit­tedly not the most stan­dard one for me, as Eleonore is not sick every day (luck­ily!). And I do work out of an office (often). And I have only one kid to take care of — I know there are many out there who jug­gle it with many more!

Any­one who finds this being too sim­i­lar to their daily rou­tine though: can rec­om­mend read­ing the excel­lent blog on hire­my­par­ents! Today: 6 Work Life bal­ance tips for chron­i­cally over­whelmed par­ents. Whole site really worth a visit!

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Today I picked a favourite out of my RSS feed of var­i­ous blogs that I have started to fol­low. The title ‘How Green is your Office? Eco-Friendly Host­ing’ by Fam­ily Friendly Work­ing / Anto­nia Chitty (which I really rec­om­mend to all you Mumpre­neurs out there to check out, lots of good posts and use­ful advice) caught my eye. Anto­nia gives some good tips on how she has built up a good ‘green pol­icy’ : using fair trade tea and cof­fee, not print if it can be avoided it, get the kids to draw on the back of paper that is only printed on one side, re-use pack­ag­ing and and use eco-friendly office sup­plies (which appar­ently are pro­moted in the UK — well done! Are they plan­ning to open a Dutch branch as well??).

A new idea that she pro­motes via her blog is eco-friendly host­ing for your web­site — now, that seems to be an easy way to save energy with­out com­pro­mis­ing qual­ity or even feel­ing any ‘sacrifice’.

The post inspired me to add a few tips myself:

Check out a a Dutch inven­tion called Eco­font. It’s a clever, ‘hol­low’ font, where the let­ters are per­fo­rated by lots of small, almost invis­i­ble, empty cir­cles. This means less ink, about 20%, is used when print­ing! It’s free, just down­load, install and start sav­ing. Smart think­ing, don’t you agree! The font is very clean and neat, so should not bother any­one. Because let’s be hon­est: the entirely paper­less office is still a bit of an utopia, in any case to me. Espe­cially since my email (pri­vate) host crashed about a year ago, delet­ing all email cor­re­spon­dence from the about 18 months of my startup time for my busi­ness in the process. Now… I use Gmail.… and.… I am glad I have stuck to the habit of print­ing out the most impor­tant emails for pos­si­ble future ref­er­ence. You never know when you will need them, because you never know in busi­ness when some­one you think you could per­fectly trust shows another face.

My sec­ond tip is to check out a cool new Swedish com­pany called Cre­at­a­bles. They  develop smart prod­ucts from indus­trial sur­plus mate­ri­als and waste — and make great toys from it; not to men­tion mag­a­zine hold­ers and note­boards from used ten­nis courts (!)  and they have won a prize for a clever clotes-pin. And watch out, these guys are going global!

Find­ing Antonia’s blog­post also inspired me to think about the green pol­icy of Mum­my­Mug™ as such. Of Mum­my­Mug™ as a com­pany, as a prod­uct. After all, we are going to sell a plas­tic prod­uct, albeit one made out of an advanced mate­r­ial that more feels like ceram­ics than plas­tic. But I can under­stand if it might not appear as the biggest con­tri­bu­tion to human­ity to put one more plas­tic thingamy in the market.

Well — we do care! And we do have a plan. Let me explain:

* We will make the best pos­si­ble, con­scious choice of mate­ri­als that are as climate-friendly as pos­si­ble. The mate­r­ial we plan to use for man­u­fac­tur­ing of the Mum­my­Mug™ has been cho­sen for its stur­di­ness, so the mug does not shat­ter if it falls. That is of course essen­tial for safety. It has also been cho­sen for its ceramic look-and-feel: it is about as heavy as ceram­ics and feels ceramic to the touch, as I really believe that you as a user would pre­fer some­thing that is as close as one can get to your reg­u­lar, hug-me ceramic mug. Of course we had to reckon with the resis­tance to high tem­per­a­tures (at least 100 degrees) and of course the user has to be able to clean it with reg­u­lar deter­gents — noone wants a tea­mug with brown per­ma­nent stains, right? Last but not least, we obvi­ously had to work within the short-list of food approved mate­ri­als, by all applic­a­ble stan­dards. Thus we ended up with some­thing quite sturdy. It made it impos­si­ble to go for a bamboo-plastic or some­thing sim­i­lar. Nev­er­the­less, the mate­r­ial is still recy­clable, that I do want to point out. And the real good news are: the man­u­fac­turer of that mate­r­ial is in the process of mak­ing what they call an IQ-version, which has only a 25% car­bon foot­print com­pared to the cur­rent ver­sion! As soon as this mate­r­ial is ready for com­mer­cial release, we will switch to it to make sure the Mum­my­Mug™ is as lit­tle of a strain as pos­si­ble on our planet.

* We will con­sider sell­ing ‘spare parts’. The lid of the Mum­my­Mug™ con­tains a kind of vent. After pro­longed and inten­sive use, the per­for­mance of this vent will even­tu­ally dimin­ish, and should at some point be replaced to make sure safety is not com­pro­mised. That is after all what the Mum­my­Mug™ is there for. But to buy a whole new cup and a lid would of course be a waste — as the cup will still be in per­fect order. Instead, we are con­sid­er­ing sell­ing replace­ment lids, so that the life-time of the mug becomes… basi­cally end­less. And hey, then you can even pimp your mug in the future, by choos­ing a lid with a dif­fer­ent colour ;-)

* We will con­sider a pro­gramme for return­ing used mugs for re-use in pro­duc­tion. Now, imag­ine the sit­u­a­tion that your kids have got­ten older, and you feel you can safely start using open cups again. We’re still work­ing on the logis­tics, but the aim is to pro­vide ou could then choose to recy­cle the Mum­my­Mug™ in the reg­u­lar recy­cling for plas­tics — or send it back to us, so we can grind it and sim­ply.… make new Mum­my­Mugs™ to make other moth­ers happy. Trust me, this will not save us that much money, I realise that, but I feel would be a great way to feed back into the loop what belongs in the loop.

* The Mum­my­Mug™ will lower the need for expen­sive health care. You hope­fully know by now that the Mum­my­Mug™ is about safety: it is about pre­vent­ing that yet another kid ends up spend­ing two weeks in hos­pi­tal and gets enor­mously expen­sive, not to men­tion painful, treat­ment and skin grafts there, because of a scald from hot bev­er­ages. I believe that keep­ing that kid, happy, safe and at home instead of locked up in a process of enor­mously expen­sive, whater-it-takes kind of treat­ment and val­i­da­tion, is surely going to make a con­tri­bu­tion to a more sus­tain­able soci­ety.  And — a hap­pier one! ;-)

* Last but not least: we will cer­tainly make every ‘green’ choice we can in the office. Inspired by Anto­nia, I here and now vow to hunt down green office sup­plies in the Nether­lands, to choose a hybrid car when­ever there would be enough rev­enue to get a lease car for this busi­ness, to keep on bik­ing as often as that is fea­si­ble, to keep on print­ing with Eco­font and use double-sided print­ing.  We already have a very flex­i­ble organ­i­sa­tion, which means we do not keep an expen­sive large, energy con­sum­ing office, nor do we engage in exten­sive trav­el­ling, but for exam­ple arrange a lot of the work via Skype. And I  do believe one of the the green con­tri­bu­tions we can achieve by build­ing a net­worked society.

In other words, we will do all these lit­tle things, and strive for achiev­ing the big things and contributions,

to make our con­tri­bu­tion to  our joint effort to cre­ate a bet­ter cli­mate. I think being very con­scious is the best start, and that I believe I am

- hey, who arent’ these days?!?! Which leads me to the last, log­i­cal ques­tion: what are your best tips?  Look­ing for­ward to lis­ten and learn!

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So — there was no escape in the end. The swine flu has hit the Nether­lands really hard the last cou­ple of weeks, and although I stuck my head in the sand and hoped we would stay clear of it: broad-scale vac­ci­na­tions are sched­uled to start Nov 24th, we would of course each get an injec­tion and after that we would be home free.

Now. Well. That was kind of wish­ful think­ing more than a plan.

Because yes­ter­day it started to hap­pen: Muu­u­uum, I have a sore throat.… Muuum, I’m tired… Two hours later I sat with a very sick child in my arms. And moth­ers being what moth­ers are, and I no dif­fer­ent from the rest, noth­ing else mat­tered any­more. A pow­er­ful thing, this flu, it really hits when it hits.  Know­ing that there is a very small but still a real risk it can poten­tially even kill per­fectly healthy peo­ple of course also makes it an out­right scary expe­ri­ence to see your most loved one have it.

The obvi­ous con­se­quence was of course that my well-thought out work plan for the week was out the win­dow and swapped for one totally arranged around what now had to come first, sec­ond and third: TLC 24/7 and all else I can give to help her through this, includ­ing the readi­ness every sec­ond to act, should she turn out to need med­ical attention.

And I am sure that I share this with all moth­ers out there. That re-prioritizing hap­pens instantly — you just do that.  No mat­ter how many items were marked URGENT in bright red on that care­fully worked out To Do-list, no mat­ter how ambi­tious we feel when everyone’s healthy. At the time of mak­ing the plan­ning last Fri­day, it would have been com­pletely impos­si­ble to imag­ine I would not pay imme­di­ate atten­tion to exe­cu­tion as of Mon­day morn­ing, as I am a fan of plan­ning and struc­ture — and delivery.

I’d of course lie if I said that it does not at all mat­ter that my work week sud­denly was not going to hap­pen — of course it mat­ters; there are impor­tant things for my busi­ness that now will have to wait a bit, net­work­ing events that will be missed, as well as that bi-weekly choir reherseal that does noth­ing for my busi­ness, but won­ders for me and my well being.

But each time such a sit­u­a­tion arises, I am so amazed to see — no, to really feel — that it is a re-prioritizing in the heart, not with the head. I’m sure every Mum out there under­stands what I mean. It has con­se­quences, some things I am dis­ap­pointed I will sim­ply miss. But OK. So be it. The world will still turn, the com­pany will not instantly fall apart and I rest in the con­vic­tion that I need to focus on what mat­ters most. Period.

I am quite a fem­i­nist and have been known to be a vocal sup­porter of the view that men and women, fathers and moth­ers, should share this respon­si­bil­ity equally for their chil­dren, and equally ‘sac­ri­fice’ their careers. There should be no auto­matic assump­tion — as admit­tedly there is in our fam­ily — that the woman should be the one tak­ing it on herself.

But truth be told: since I have become a mother myself, I have realised that in this kind of sit­u­a­tion, I do not want to be the one leav­ing in the morn­ing and won­der dur­ing the day from a dis­tance how she is doing. I want to be the one on the couch hold­ing her hand. Biol­ogy or not — that is just the way I feel, and as much as I still want equal­ity in soci­ety, I’ll stand for that feeling.

Luck­ily daugh­ter and I still had an OK night (thanks to some Tamil­flu, lots of lemon­ade and even more parac­eta­mol) and have made it through the day (thanks to a com­fort­able couch, an abun­dant stock of DVDs and — thank God — a well-stocked fridge) with­out too much suf­fer­ing. Yes, pre­cious is clearly sick and this flu is clearly nasty, but so far she’s rid­ing out the storm quite well.  Thank God. First day over.

And luck­ily — it is actu­ally still pos­si­ble to do quite a lot.  To take a phonecall, fire off an email, in between giv­ing sips of drink, mak­ing tem­per­a­ture mea­sure­ments, giv­ing cud­dles and chang­ing the DVD. It is pos­si­ble to do what I do now: to ham­mer away at a new blog post, now that she has fallen into a rest­less sleep, and I can take lit­tle breaks in the writ­ing to check on her when needed. So I do feel con­fi­dent I will still get at least those very most urgent urgent mat­ters worked off that list in spite of it all, actu­ally almost effort­lessly and totally in between.

Mod­ern tech­nol­ogy, and hav­ing cho­sen the risky but free career of an entre­pre­neur, of course facil­i­tates this flex­i­bil­ity, as I, as self-employed, am priv­i­leged not tied to an office or to office hours. Very under­stand­ably one of the main rea­sons — is my guess any­way– so many of my fel­low car­ing and ambi­tious Mums out there have cho­sen to start their own busi­ness or a WAHM freelance/parttime from home. We can have the cake and eat it.

Now. Please wish me luck — because if I now come down myself now with that smack-bang fever, I’ll nei­ther be able to care for my lit­tle girl, blog nor tick off that list for my busi­ness.….…. So I sup­posed I am back to where I started — some­what naively stick­ing my con­vic­tion that I’ll sill tbe home free. Time will tell.

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I stum­bled across this video on Home Safety on YouTube, posted by the UK Depart­ment for Chil­dren, Schools and Families.

Of course curi­ous what their pos­si­ble mes­sage on the risks of scalds from hot bev­er­ages would be. And indeed: they cer­tainly high­light the dam­age that can be caused by show­ing the acci­dent as it hap­pens from the child’s point of view. A pow­er­ful way of illus­trat­ing the risks we take, or let our chil­dren take, rather, and to make us feel the dan­ger in our bones. The voiceover com­ple­ments the images: for us adults, a spilled cup of cof­fee means a 2-minute has­sle to re-boil the ket­tle. But for your child, it can mean two months in hos­pi­tal to  treat the skin grafts.

How­ever — where I don’t agree is on their pre­ven­tion strat­egy. The father in the clip places the cof­fee cup in the mid­dle of the table as a pre­ven­tive move.

That is good.

But I do believe the Mum­my­Mug is a way bet­ter. Just like the mother in the video clip places a secu­rity gate in front of the stairs to pre­vent a fall, we should choose for a smart solu­tion also for scald­ing burns.

This inspired me to do some­thing long over­due: to update the sec­tion of the Mum­my­Mug home­page on the real­ity of scald­ing burns: now you can find a range of sta­tis­tics, reports and, last but not least, tips and a video instruc­tion on how to deal with a scald, should the acci­dent nev­er­the­less hap­pen. Hope you will find it useful!

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The last few days, I’ve spent a lot of time think­ing about social media this blog, the Mum­my­Mug and the world of online Mums.I’ve been explor­ing the Mum-blog uni­verse, read lots of posts on social media and came across some­one who rightly points out a few things (I do rec­om­mend you to read the whole post here; guest post by Michael Brito posted on Brian Solis, Pr 2.0)

Real­ity #1: Con­sumers already get it; brands are still try­ing to fig­ure it out.

Real­ity #2: Brands should focus on the peo­ple first, tools last. 

Real­ity #3: There is no such thing as a social media expert quite yet.

To sum it up, he argues that social media is about authen­tic peo­ple and about tools and processes in con­stant flux. And this does not match the stan­dard cor­po­rate one-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gies of yes­ter­day. And it gives voice to the con­stituen­cies that are sup­posed to buy the prod­ucts that com­pa­nies tweet about.

Of course it was always a no-brainer to use social media to pro­mote the Mum­my­Mug — an afford­able way to do mar­ket­ing, and a good sales chan­nel (this said: prod­uct ful­fil­ment is in this case still VERY much offline, and there I still have to find the most cost effec­tive model as the pur­chase has to be deliv­ered with­out it cost­ing an arm and a leg and with­out con­sumers hav­ing to wait 3 weeks to get it in the mailbox).

But I want to go beyond that: I want the brand to really be BY the online Mums — the real ones. And serve online mums, to give them a prod­uct they really want and need.  I want the Mum­my­Mug brand to be crafted inside social media, but just com­mu­ni­cated through it.

Why? Because as much as Mum­my­Mug is a brick-and-mortar prod­uct like any other, and I need to make money sell­ing it, just like any other com­pany, Mum­my­Mug IS about real moth­ers. I am a very real one-man band (mother) who wanted to make some­thing really use­ful. Mum­my­Mug will deliver a real ben­e­fit to the moth­ers who choose to use it. And I would not want it any other way than how THEY want it. And I want the suc­cess to be a shared one.

I am try­ing to cre­ate and launch­ing a com­pletely new and inde­pen­dent brand in the midst of a dynamic social media take-off. I have a prod­uct aimed at a demo­graphic that is very much active in the social media sphere.

So — it must be pos­si­ble to make it happen!

How? I look for a strong Mum on each anchor mar­ket, to be the Mum­my­Mug Mum. Some­one who is already estab­lished, who prob­a­bly already has a pro­fes­sional back­ground in mar­ket­ing. A Mumpre­neur. To blog, pro­mote and con­nect with the Mums online. To lis­ten, to crowd­source  ideas for what the Mum­my­Mug should evolve into  — and to feed that back into the Mum­my­Mug Hub (read:me) so I can tune the prod­uct and the brand into the needs of the Mums out there. In other words: I am work­ing to build a net­work of free­lance Mum-bloggers, that together with me can put the magic into the Mum­my­Mug brand.

These Mum­my­Mug Mums who would not only be free­lance mar­ke­teers, and cer­tainly be given a busi­ness oppor­tu­nity where they would share in the finan­cial suc­cess they will hope­fully help cre­ate,  but truly live the brand, in flesh and blood, and con­nect through social media with other real Mums out there.

Together, I am sure we can cre­ate some­thing from which every­body wins.

So — are you the Mum­my­Mug Mum I am look­ing for? Then I can’t wait to hear from you (cecilia@mummymug.com )

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