I guess most of us have a dou­ble feel­ing about New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions. Nor­mally they turn into a bad con­science than an achieved goal. And instead of tak­ing us for­ward,  they make us feel like losers who are so pathetic, we can’t even keep promises to ourself.

Shona  Par­tridge from Women Mean Busi­ness is say­ing: ditch the New Year’s res­o­lu­tions! But nevethe­less take stock of where you are and take this oppor­tu­nity to look for­ward. I  par­tic­u­larly like her tip to con­cen­trate on one or two life areas each quar­ter of the year. Con­sider your health, fit­ness, finances, career, home life, rela­tion­ships and per­sonal dreams — but not all at the same time! Start with the one that would make the biggest dif­fer­ence in your life and start there.

What­ever one likes to call them — goals, res­o­lu­tions, ideas.…. I believe that tak­ing stock of where one is, and chart­ing a way for­ward is use­ful, and why not do it at the begin­ning of a new year? When some­thing is out­spo­ken, it becomes more real.  And if it is sin­cerely meant, just think­ing it it will affect you.

So here are some of the inspi­ra­tional New Year’s res­o­lu­tions I have har­vested from the online com­mu­nity of Mums I’m following:

Anto­nia Chitty, an inspir­ing and estab­lished UK Mumpre­neur with sev­eral use­ful blogs such as Fam­i­lyFriend­ly­Work­ing did a mini-survey and got inspir­ing feed­back from women wov­ing to cre­ate vis­i­ble results and more sales in 2010, to have time for them­selves as well as their busines and to pre­vent that the busi­ness adven­ture makes the fam­ily strug­gle for money. But my favourite one from this one is: I’m going to work smarter, not harder!

Frumpy Mom is deter­mined to set use­ful goals that se can acu­tally meet. Such as mak­ing the kids clean up their rooms every day instead of wait­ing until they look like Tokyo after it was dev­as­tated by Godzilla. And to stop ask­ing stu­pid ques­tions, i.e. “Did you brush your teeth?” and instead issue com­mands. “Brush your teeth.” The one I think I will also put on my list is how­ever “Keep a stash of choco­late hid­den from my chil­dren for emer­gency anti-stress appli­ca­tion”. Which how­ever is in strong com­pe­ti­tion with the one “To never, ever take my chil­dren into a gro­cery store again, unless they are 35 years old and spend­ing their own money”.

Kather­ine from One Work­ing Woman’s blog has an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive: make a fam­ily res­o­lu­tion, such as going more green, eat together reg­u­larly or come up with new ways to speed up morn­ing rou­tines. As she points out, a big bonus to fam­ily res­o­lu­tions: When you do it together, you’re more likely to keep each other on track!

Lisa Ciani goes for mommy res­o­lu­tions. Actu­ally, with­out think­ing of them as res­o­lu­tions at all — just a way to reaf­firm the type of mother she strives to be. More patient; not tak­ing her stress out on the fam­ily. Less dis­tracted and actu­ally pay­ing atten­tion to what is going on — which means pri­or­i­tize and plan.  And here is my favourite: “I’ll stop talk­ing about how tired I am. Really, aren’t all moms tired? Some­times I bore myself with my tales of woe about not get­ting enough sleep!”

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I don’t plan to make this blog a clas­sic prod­uct review plat­form — there are enough good ones out there doing that already. 

But I do plan to share inspi­ra­tional sto­ries of other suc­cess­ful Mumpre­neurs and their prod­uct or ser­vice. First and fore­most, I sim­ply feel tremen­dous respect for what they have accom­plished. I know from my own expe­ri­ence that suc­ceed­ing in prod­uct devel­op­ment, brand­ing, estab­lish­ing an IP port­fo­lio, con­vinc­ing part­ners and poten­tial cus­tomers of your idea, sourc­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers, going to trade fairs and, last but not least, rais­ing the cap­i­tal needed is a daunt­ing and 360 degree chal­lenge. So, these Mumpre­neurs deserve pub­lic­ity and that we help spread the word about them. I also sim­ply feel extremely encour­aged and inspired, as they are liv­ing proof that they can be done! I hope they will inspire you as much.

Today, I would like to put Solvej Bid­dle in the spot­light. She’s a clas­sic Mumpre­neur and has built her busi­ness while rais­ing two chil­dren, now aged 6 and 4. She is the inven­tor behind Content&Calm Cot­Canopy, which already is sell­ing well in the UK mar­ket. The Cot­Canopy is a clever baby sleep solu­tion; con­sist­ing of a light-weight canopy  that you can mount over your baby’s travel cot, to cre­ate an instant night time feel­ing. It will allow your child to stick to its rou­tine and sleep well wher­ever you go. Check out the video where Solvej explains in her own words what the Cot­Canopy is all about. The awards and press cov­er­age has come rolling in dur­ing 2009, the Cot­Canopy is sold online and also stocked at some major UK retail­ers. Solvej is now busy with expand­ing into sis­ter prod­ucts such as a canopy for the car seat, and will expand into a full prod­uct range.

Solvej orig­i­nally had the idea for it in 2003 when she took her first child, Andrea-Anna, with her on trav­els and out­ings as a baby, and found her­self strug­gling to pro­vide a fit­ting and prac­ti­cal sleep­ing envi­ron­ment for her child. I’m sure you recog­nise the sit­u­a­tion: you are away at friends for din­ner on a summer’s evening and strug­gle with hang­ing up blan­kets for the win­dows to black­out the light. Or your baby wakes up at home in at 5 a.m on a summer’s morn­ing when the sun comes up, but nei­ther baby nor you has had any­where near the amount of sleep you need to feel rested. With the Cot­Canopy, this is no longer a chal­lenge, as the lit­tle one can enjoy his or her own per­sonal dark­ened and famil­iar envi­ron­ment, even when the lights are on or the room is light.

Obvi­ously, the Cot­Canopy first and fore­most helps to us as par­ents to pro­tect a lit­tle one’s pre­cious rou­tine and I think a reg­u­lar, good sleep is one of the num­ber one things we as par­ents all aim to pro­vide for our kids.

But impor­tantly, this prod­uct also has ben­e­fits for the rest of the fam­ily. It avoids putting every­one else in the room in the dark when baby needs a nap, and grants us that flex­i­bil­ity to travel or stay­ing with friends. In all hon­esty, at least I find that it does kind of took some of the fun out of the hol­i­day to turn out the lights at 19h30 while on hol­i­day, and spend the rest of the evening your­self fum­bling around a dark hotel room so that baby can sleep.

Now, that is my kind of prod­uct — it meets the needs of both the chil­dren and the adults in the fam­ily. It is use­ful, it has been designed to meet real needs. And it has been cre­ated and brought to mar­ket with pas­sion and perseverance.

That is inspi­ra­tional! Con­grat­u­la­tions and good luck Solvej.

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When brows­ing through my Google reader today, I stum­bled upon an irre­sistible pic­ture of the Noonie on Baby­gad­get.

The Noonie caught my eye as a smart and styl­ish baby swad­dle; designed and man­u­fac­tured by US Mumpre­neur and cre­ative designer Lalas Pequenos, based in Vir­ginia. It looks so cud­dly I almost feel inspired to try for another baby just to have an excuse to buy one.

Accord­ing to her pro­file, Lalas is the mother of two ‘very busy boys’ aged 7 and 8 and wants to cre­ate keep­sake, envi­ron­men­tally con­scious and entirely hand­crafted items which she sells online. What I was even more impressed by, how­ever, that this Mom not only man­ages her fam­ily as well as her busi­ness and makes gor­geous swad­dles. Along with her fam­ily and busi­ness part­ners, she also owns a 1500 acre pri­mary rain for­est in Costa Rica and a por­tion of all pro­ceeds from the Lala’s Pequeños line go to help pre­serve the Rain­maker Con­ser­va­tion Project.

In other words: she proves that Cor­po­rate Social Resposi­bil­ity is not a lux­ury, but also some­thing small busi­nesses can do. That is a word worth spreading!

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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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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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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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Today, I have spent over four hours in the car. I have in that time actu­ally not trans­ported myself any fur­ther than back and forth to one sin­gle meet­ing, that took place about 90 kilo­me­ters from my Mum­my­Mug office in The Hague. So, the aver­age 2 hours that I spent dri­ving each way to get there mean I aver­aged a stun­ning 45 kms per hour. On the high­way. Wow. Now, that is the real­ity of liv­ing in the Nether­lands: a great but very, very full lit­tle coun­try, that clogs up every day with queues even though the land­scape is criss-crossed by four or six lane high­ways. And how could we not have these queues, with more than 17 mil­lion peo­ple crowded together here in the polder land­scape? We actu­ally have a pop­u­la­tion den­sity com­pa­ra­ble to that of Bangladesh.

Quite a stark con­trast to Swe­den: my region in Swe­den, Sma­land, has about the sur­face of the Nether­lands, and boasts  a mere 500,000 inhab­i­tants. And that, folks, is a pop­u­lated area of Swe­den. Well — to make up for it, we have at least 17 mil­lion trees though.…

So today, my car was my best friend, and it really deserves a pre­sen­ta­tion I believe. It is a Volvo (of course), a true clas­sic, box-style 240 sta­tion wagon, with nearly 300,000 kms on the teller and is cour­tesy to my brother-in-law, who could not part from his beloved Volvo when upgrad­ing to a newer model. As I can­not afford much more than a bike, really, hav­ing spent all my money on Mum­my­Mug pro­to­types in the past three years, I was very happy to get the chance to take it over.

Because although I must be bru­tally hon­est and admit I do drive this par­tic­u­lar car because I can’t afford another (if I could choose freely, I sup­pose I would go for some­thing with air­con­di­tion­ing, a func­tion­ing radio and power steer­ing. If I could choose REALLY freely, I’d choose an Audi TT.)

But — apart from the sheer func­tion­al­ity, that it starts, moves and tak­ing me to my meet­ings, and apart from the obvi­ous loud and clear state­ment it makes about my Swedish her­itage, it does have tremen­dous char­ac­ter. It’s kind of sail­ing on the road, gen­tly bounc­ing a bit, plough­ing for­ward with dig­nity among all the newer mod­els on the road. it seems to be say­ing: here I come, and I am not mak­ing any excuses! The seats are gen­er­ous, the vis­i­bil­ity great. It is BIG — feels big while dri­ving it, and feels totally absolutely enor­mous when try­ing to park it: yep, I do admit I some­times cir­cle around to find a really eas­ily acces­si­ble simply-drive-in-with-your-nose-first park­ing place, because I will not even think about manoev­er­ing it back­wards into a tiny spot along the road, surely mea­sured made more for a Smart rather than this REAL car.

Oth­ers do recog­nise this too: today, while fill­ing up the tank, a guy get­ting out of a new Volvo (of course) at the pump next to mine gave me (well, the car then!) an appre­cia­tive nod and said: ‘Mooie bak!!’ So you see, it even earns me respect with the guys.

And most impor­tantly: there is some­thing truly bitter-sweet about dri­ving around in this old car. A proud and almost rebel­lious feeling.

Because I know that I drive this par­tic­u­lar car, right now, because of the very a con­scious choice to go for it with Mum­my­Mug. And thus to put the money where it really belongs: in the core of the busi­ness. And to stick with it, no mat­ter how long it takes to reach the goal.

And to feel that what does it mat­ter, if I don’t drive the most lux­u­ri­ous car in the world? What does it mat­ter when I have the fan­tas­tic priv­i­lege instead of fol­low­ing the real dream of cre­at­ing my own business!

Let’s just hope that the car makes it through the next annual inspec­tion, so it also can stay on the road. Either that, or that Mum­my­Mug is on the mar­ket in the mean­time, so I can finally lease that Audi.… ;-)

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Trains are great. Almost door-to-door high speed trans­porta­tion, such as the Thalys, con­nect­ing major cities in the Benelux and France. Within a short 3,5 hours, the Thalys is tak­ing its pas­sen­gers from Oh La La Paris back to the good ol’ Hague. The clear con­science that comes from choos­ing to travel green is of course an extra bonus.

And as most of us surely have expe­ri­enced, trains are great for meet­ing peo­ple. You’re seated next to a stranger for sev­eral hours, and if one has the nerve and energy to pick up con­ver­sa­tion, there is always some­thing to be learned. Some­times just about someone’s des­ti­na­tion or ori­gin, the book they brought along to read and some­times their whole life story … which surely may be inter­est­ing, but surely not always is rel­e­vant for busi­ness. Which of course also is not what one always looks or hopes for.

But yes­ter­day, on the Thalys storm­ing over the Low Coun­tries, the seat­ing arrange­ment was surely a jack­pot from a busi­ness point of view. Not only was the gen­tle­man next to me witty, ener­getic and inter­est­ing: he was also the inter­na­tional sales direc­tor for a major Amer­i­can com­pany deal­ing exclu­sively in dif­fer­ent kinds of safety prod­ucts, and with an annual turnover of over 1bnUS. Sli­i­i­i­ightly big­ger than my Mum­my­Mug Inc, thus. But nev­er­the­less, we found lots to talk about: he gladly shared his expe­ri­ence and insights, and I gladly shared the energy and chal­lenges I meet in my startup ven­ture and we both had fun. The 3,5 hours from Paris to The Hague lit­er­ally flew by as I got my feed of real-life sto­ries about the chal­lenges and oppor­tun­ti­ties in set­ting up inter­na­tional dis­tri­b­u­tion agree­ments, defend­ing trade­marks and man­ag­ing an ever evolv­ing and large prod­uct port­fo­lio on inter­na­tional scale.

So, thank you Thalys for offer­ing me not only a ride from A to B, but a mini-MBA mod­ule and a con­nec­tion that I surely look for­ward to stay­ing in touch with.

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