In many play­groups, the mem­bers sim­ply take turns host­ing the play­group in their own homes. Which is not only an afforable but also very warm and friendly way to organ­ise a suit­able venue. But espe­cially if the play­group is organ­ised in a home envi­ron­ment, it is use­ful to agree on some Ground Rules and take some sim­ple mea­sures, to keep it safe for every­body and avoid unnec­es­sary dam­age to your belong­ings. Because as much as your home prob­a­bly is adapted to the life of one tod­dler or two, it is quite dif­fer­ent to have per­haps as many as ten run­ning around.

- Own­er­ship. Spell it out the obvi­ous: every­one is respon­si­ble for safety. Although you’ll surely want to chat and relax, each Mum must actively keep at least one eye on their own children.

- Overview. Cleary decide in which area of your home the play­group par­tic­i­pants should stay — prefer­ably in an open space where the adults can sit down but always can see the kids. Check the floor care­fully for any small for­got­ten items and toys that tod­dlers could choke on. — Make sure that any gates in front of stairs are securely closed.

Don’t be shy to close off the rest of your home: lock the door to your home office and if pos­si­ble, try to close off the kitchen so that no chil­dren can wan­der in there unsu­per­vised. Also put toys that you know your child for sure does not want to share or would not like to see get bro­ken, in one of the off-limits rooms.

- Pro­tec­tion. In the area you do pro­vide as play space, remove all frag­ile items or at least put them out of tod­dler reach. Cover that white couch with a blan­ket that eas­ily can be thrown in the wash.

- Pro­vide a cen­tral play point. Put a blan­ket on the floor in the mid­dle of the room, and put the toys you would like to share in the group on it. It will  make it an invit­ing place for the kids to sit and play together in a place where you can see them.

- Make it pos­si­ble for them to run around safely. Remove any rugs on which kids who run around play­ing hide-and-seek eas­ily could trip and fall. If you have fur­ni­ture with sharp cor­ners, con­sider plac­ing cor­ner covers.

- Stay healthy. Agree that any child (or Mum) with a fever, stom­ach virus or other trans­mit­table dis­ease stays away from the play­group meet­ing. Agree that all kids wash their hands before they grab the snacks.

-  Keep it spill-free. Serve the kids drinks in small car­tons with straws, and serve tea and cof­fee to the adults in lid­ded cups, such as the Mum­my­Mug, to avoid spillage and scalds. Never ever leave for exam­ple a ket­tle or a teapot on the table, but serve and put it back in the kitchen.

- But just in case… Check in advance where you have your first aid kit and that it is still prop­erly stocked with band aids — so you know where to look should an acci­dent still happen.

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When I was preg­nant, I  joined a ‘Bumps and Babies’ get-together-group for Mums and kids, think­ing it was good to make friends both with expe­ri­enced Mums (whom I of course admired a lot, they were already the experts) and other preg­nant women who would be on mater­nity leave dur­ing the same period as I. Later, the group mor­phed into a weekly Cof­fee Morn­ing meet-up. This became a much-needed push to over­come the fatigue and actu­ally to get out of the house and socialise.

We got to know each other so well that it truly became a sis­ter­hood of women, who just like like me were strug­gling to find their feet again in the entirely new role as ‘Mum’, and made my first months as a mother much hap­pier. Sev­eral of the women I met this way have become true friends.

This was in other words my ini­ti­a­tion to the phe­nom­e­non of play­groups and cof­fee morn­ing meet-ups, that seem to spring like mush­rooms out of the ground wher­ever there are young families.

And rightly so! Play­groups are great for the kids, who get to play with each other — and let’s also not under­es­ti­mate even a small child’s need for change and enter­tain­ment. My daugh­ter is an only child, so for her, our Cof­fee Morn­ings were her first real chance to develop social con­tacts with other lit­tle ones.

And I am sure most Mums agree - the play­group is also very much a play­ground for Mum. To break the iso­la­tion, to find a sup­port net­work and sim­ply relax and have fun together, while the kids (hope­fully, and at least fo 3 min­utes at a time) enter­tain each other. Win-win sit­u­a­tion in other words.

One thing that struck me, though. For a meetup  called a Cof­fee Morn­ing, there really was awfully lit­tle cof­fee involved. It was served, of course, and we would try to outdo each other by serv­ing lattes, mac­chi­atos and — some­times — plain brew.

But as we were so afraid that we would spill the drink while the kids were play­ing around us, we safely placed the cups some­where on the top of a book­shelf — and watched them grow cold. And it kind of took the Cof­fee out of the Cof­fee Morning.

Now that the Mum­my­Mug is on the hori­zon, that can change. Mum­my­Mug will make it pos­si­ble to keep that cof­fee on the table and will safely put the cof­fee in the Cof­fee Morn­ing Play­group. And I am proud that will mean mak­ing a good thing for Mums even better!

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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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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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Thanks for com­ing to the Mum­my­Mug blog. Soon we will start full fledge our blog and update you about the first pro­duc­tion, the actions, the new dis­trib­u­tors and all that makes Mum­my­Mug the safe hot drink solu­tion for you! We’ll keep you posted!

Thanks, the Mum­my­Mug team.

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