Austin City Limits
Sep 16 2007

I have lived in Austin for quite some time now but have never made it to the Austin City Limits music festival.  Today we found ourselves right next door without even thinking about it.  The ACL music festival is held at Zilker park which is near the newly renamed Town Lake.  It’s now called Lady Bird Lake in honor of Lady Bird Johnson who passed away earlier this year.

The kids woke up around 6:00 a.m. (bleh) so since they don’t make it easy for us to stay in bed and sleep we were all up we decided to go for a walk near Lady Bird Lake.  Tons of people and their dogs were out walking, running, and biking on the trail.  It was one of those gorgeous spring-like mornings: sunny skies, 77 degrees, and a slight breeze.  We went to feed some ducks, swans, fish, and turtles and then headed over to the playscape area.  We were literally the only people there!  The kids had the whole place to themselves.  We think it’s because they had blocked off direct parking access to the playscape area because of ACL.  We had walked in through the back way.  We heard some of the bands practicing and saw the media vans and set-up crew through the fences.  As we were leaving the park around 10:00 a.m. we started seeing the attendees filter in.

Maybe when the kids are older we can take them to the music festival but for now I’d rather stay away from the ear-drum smashing loud noises, crowds, and hot weather (usually 90+ degrees here in the afternoon).  🙂

New eMomsatHome.com Internet Home Business Magazine
Sep 13 2007

Wendy Piersall just announced her new site and new business model: eMomsatHome.com Internet Home Business Magazine.  Congratulations Wendy!  In my opinion, she is one of the best examples I’ve seen of an entrepreneur helping to shift our perceptions of what entrepreneurship means.

To follow up on my last post on time-saving tips for parents, she has an excellent post called 25 Parent Productivity Tools for busy Moms, Dads, and Kids that you should check out.

We are still finalizing the new blog design and corporate site for Babble Soft.  It always seems to take to the very last minute to get projects done.  According to the 4 Hour Work Week, there is something called Parkinson’s Law that defines this phenomena.  “Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.  It is the magic of the imminent deadline.”  I haven’t had time to finish this book, but will write about it when I do.  Needless to say I think it’s taking me more than 4 hours just to get through the book!  Well we have missed the first deadline (9/12) for the current projects for a variety of reasons, so even if I have to learn how to do website design/development (or beg my husband to help me) it will get done by the new deadline! 

Oh, and did I mention our daughter has been home sick most of yesterday and today?  She’s better today but I am keeping her home to let her rest.  Being able to be with my kids when they need me and not being stressed about not going into work is a big reason why I like working from home and being an entrepreMuse. 🙂

FYI: Time-Saving Websites for Parents
Sep 12 2007

Sylvester Becker (a.k.a. The German Cowboy), co-founder of Austin Business Babes sent me a link to a post called time-saving websites a while back.  Well I’ve been so busy with kid stuff, blog re-design work, corporate website updating work, press release creation for Baby Say Cheese, that I have only now had time to post about it!  I’m crossing my fingers that most of the current work projects will be done next week…which means it’s on to another set of projects.

Sure, the Web can be a big time-waster (gofugyourself.com, anyone?), but if used wisely, it can be a great time-saver. Check out these 12 sites every busy parent should know about.  By Mark Frauenfelder.  Click here to read the post.  He has some neat ideas about how to save time with Travel, Activities, Shopping, etc.  Check it out!

Oprah and Obama
Sep 10 2007

I just finished reading a wonderful re-cap of the fundraiser thrown by Oprah for Barack Obama posted by PamelaW on Silicon Valley Moms Blog.

Oh man, I hope to meet Oprah one day.  I admire her on so many levels.  I don’t get to watch her show often (but most of the ones I’ve seen are great!) because I’m too busy working, hanging out with the kids, or trying to get some sleep. 🙂

Here’s the comment I left on the SVMs Blog:
Thanks for the great re-cap! I find it wonderful to be part of a very diverse crowd because diversity is our future. Plus, I personally find it more interesting than being in a sea of White.

I am still unsure of who I will vote for but I wouldn’t say inexperience is a reason not to vote for someone. I am an entrepreneur and by definition many young entrepreneurs are inexperienced…they are helping to create a new future. If experience is the main factor then I’m sure George Washington wouldn’t have been elected today.

Bush was a governor and I’m not sure that really helped America or him do the best job.

To me the questions to answer are: Are they smart AND intelligent? Are they trustworthy? Do they listen? Can they learn quickly? Are they willing to acknowledge mistakes, make course corrections, and move on? Are they a good family man or woman? Are they genuine? Etc.

I hope to get the opportunity to meet Oprah in my lifetime!

I don’t know enough politically to offer an educated opinion on all of the candidates, and I will refrain from doing so here on this blog because everyone has the right to their own opinion.  I mainly wanted to bring up for discussion the subject of being experienced or not when it comes to being judged on whether someone is the ‘right’ person for a particular job, to start a company, to run for election, etc.  What do you think?

Link Love Using a Baby Rattle
Sep 9 2007

I’ve been meaning to make some rattling noise and send some Link Love out to those bloggers kind enough to mention my posts on their blogs and am just now getting around to doing it.  Here it goes:

The Literary Junkie

Brown Thoughts

down with the kids

customers are always

raising4boys.com

Startup Spark

Career Intensity

Working at Home on the Internet

The Twinkies – Adventures in Sleep Deprivation, Now with Tantrums

Thank you great bloggers!

Pardon The Dust…
Sep 7 2007

I am currently working with a fab designer to create a custom blog design.  The re-design should go live by middle of next week.  I know you are all going to miss the standard, plain wordpress template I’ve been using!  {insert sarcasm here}  I am also changing the name of the blog and making it indicative of the fact that I’m the one that is doing the blogging…not Babble Soft…even though I’m the founder. 🙂 

From what I’ve been reading at The Viral Garden, business bloggers really should not be blogging that much about their business anyway as people can only handle so many posts about how glorious it is.  [They can just go to your company’s Press page to figure that out.] Duh!  Took me a few weeks to get that, but now I understand.  I will still of course have links to my current ventures and post about Babble Soft stuff (e.g., baby tips) from time to time because that is part of my life.  

As people all over the world discover my blog, I hope they will get to know me and get a better understanding of why I started Babble Soft: to help new parents (and hopefully make a little money along the way).   Maybe they will want to share our stories with the expecting and new parents, business people, and/or entrepreneurs in their lives.

I will be posting less frequently until we figure out how to migrate the domain name and not lose all of our permalinks and linkbacks.  We could leave it www.babblesoft.com/blog but I think after some time that will get confusing.   I’ve been meaning to ask Mack at The Viral garden why his blog URL is http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/ but his blog name is different.  It still routes to his blog so I’m wondering if it’s just too hard to make the change???   I’ve been actively blogging for about 4 months now and have started to increase my rank on Technorati…I wonder if those link backs will all disappear.  Maybe someone out there will know the answer.

I hope y’all (as we say here in Texas) will like our new name and design!  I always take comfort in knowing I have the right to change my mind…but that would mean a ton of work to rebrand and change the URL which sounds like a good reason not to change my mind.  So I guess the new blog name will just have to stay entrepreMusings for the rest of my life.  😀

Have a great weekend everyone!

FYI: What’s Cooking!
Sep 5 2007

Readers and friends email me about things they are up to or in to and I thought it would nice to share some of their stories.   Michelle Stern, Owner of What’s Cooking Weekly found out about our blog from a post on Mommy Track’d a while back.  She sent me information on her site and what she has been up to.  I just had to say ‘Wow!’ 

Now, I’m a person who likes to avoid the kitchen if at all possible.  I can cook and I can cook fairly well, but it is not a passion of mine.  My passions are making my kids laugh, blogging, and building businesses.  I also have to psyche myself up to go to the grocery store.  Plus after having kids, it’s much harder to cook without one of them hanging on me or needing me to get something for them. 

So after years of getting frozen prepared meals from a nearby HEB grocery store, eating out, picking up, and/or having too much spaghetti, we found a college girl who comes 2 to 3 evenings per week and helps with cooking, shopping, and cleaning the kitchen.  She is a wonderful cook…you can tell she really enjoys it, and I often wish we could afford to have her around every day!  She even lets the kids help her and doesn’t lose her cool like I do.  Maybe she can get some ideas from What’s Cooking Weekly for our family. 🙂

For those who like to cook (or don’t like to cook) and need some fast, easy meal ideas, please check out her site.  It is extremely well done and based on our email exchanges, I have been very impressed with Michelle.

About What’s Cooking Weekly
Don’t know what’s for dinner tonight?  No time to plan meals, let alone scrawl out a thorough grocery lists? Give What’s Cooking Weekly a try.  It will save your time and your sanity by providing you with healthy menus and grocery lists for 5 seasonal meals every week.  It even gives you a list of jobs your kids can do to help you prepare each recipe! Subscribe to What’s Cooking Weekly or use our free Sample Menu!  Also check out Recommended Cooking Tools for Families.

Mommy Track’d Ecards
Sep 4 2007

I  just heard about these fabulous Ecards at Mommy Track’d.  They are hilarious!  Comics are a great way to make fun of things — especially us working moms!  😀

Fortunately for me, I get to work out of my home!

Here are two of my favorites:

   �

A New Avatar – A New Hairstyle
Sep 4 2007

This Labor Day weekend, after going to a birthday party for our son’s twin friends at Brushy Creek Water park and while our daughter was taking a nap, I roped my husband and son into helping me create a new Avatar.  The one I had been using was taken on May 21, 2003 less than a year after our son was born.  Since I started blogging around May 2007, I figured I probably should get around to taking a more up-to-date picture of myself.

I was born with board straight, brown/black hair…not a curl or wave in sight.  When I hit 8th grade I hated having straight hair and started perming it (a la the 80’s hairdo) until a short reprieve between 1997 and 2002.  I got a few more perms until I became pregnant with our daughter in 2004.

After she was born, my hair experienced a miracle (or shall we say a hormonal shift) and I had naturally wavy hair.  I was shocked and pleasantly surprised.  I have to say in my 37 years of living, I have not been more happy with the state of my hair than I am now.  Well most days that is…like everyone else, I still have bad hair days!  It also helps that I found a new hairdresser who happens to charge less than 1/2 the price of the salon I used to go to.

Erin told me I should get a professional to take my headshot.  I told him I didn’t have time and we didn’t have the money to do that and insisted that he help me.  Plus I knew he would end up doing a better job than most professionals I could find…and he is much cheaper. 🙂

He worked a little of his Photoshop magic on it: played with the lighting and covered up some of the ravages of time.  And voila, a new Avatar was born.  The background is our off-white walls in our hallway.  I am still going to leave the 2003 headshot on some of my older posts but going forward until the next major hair change, I’ll be using the new one.  I also just noticed that the old one made me look a bit bright orange…

My mom and sister also had their favorites (i.e. the top two below).  The bottom two our 5 year old took so of course I love those!  The following have not been modified in Photoshop (i.e., no nice highlighted background plus all of the ravages of time and shiny spots are present).  I thought twice about putting these up, but I believe it’s important to mix in a little reality from time to time…

The Asians Shine – Musings of a Texas Gal in NYC
Sep 3 2007

Following up on The Art of War for Women written by a Chinese woman Chin-Ning Chu post, I am now going to write about the “Same-Race Discussion Circles: How Are You Powerful?” session that I referred to at the end of the post called From the Mouths of Men.

After we completed the Instant Polling session at the Working Mother Multicultural Conference (POWER: OWN IT. — USE IT. SHARE IT.), we separated into groups (e.g., Asian, African American, Hispanic, American Indian, Caucasian, and Men) and met in different rooms.  I was born in Sri Lanka (i.e., South Asia) so I was part of the Asian group.   In our rooms we then broke up into several groups of 6 to 8 people and were instructed to do the following:

1. Introduce yourself by saying your name and briefly answering the question: How am I powerful and where do I leverage it the most?
2. In the workplace how does my racial identity affect my power?
3. In the workplace what are the things I do to limit or trade off my power?

We discussed those questions in our smaller groups and then shared our answers while the moderators (Deepika Bajaj, President of Invincibelle and Janice Won, Owner of Inclusion Strategies & Diversity Solutions) could write them on a big flip pad.  They then asked who would be interested in presenting our findings to the large group (i.e., 700 people) during lunch.  Of course I volunteered because I try to take on any opportunity I can to practice my public speaking skills.  Two other women also volunteered.  One was from India and the other was from China.  I volunteered to share our findings on question #2. 

We ran late in the breakout session so I was starving!  I sat down to eat thinking they would call us up when they wanted our group to talk.  When I got up to go to the ladies room…thinking I had some time…I saw one of the other women on my team already standing in line next to the stage.  My jaw literally dropped!  I had to delay my trip to the restroom and make a beeline to the stage.  We went on after the Hispanic, African American and Native American groups.  The Indian woman started first, then I went second, and the Chinese woman addressed the third question.   Usually when I speak, I’m lucky to remember anything else that’s happening and unfortunately since I didn’t take down the summary notes for questions 1 and 3, I can only share with you the Asian group’s thoughts on question 2 which were:

• It’s a great thing to be Asian in a global environment
• When we do speak people tend to listen (I jokingly asked the question “Are you listening?” after I made that statement which got a chuckle from the audience) 🙂
• When we are in higher positions people tend to give us more credibility as they feel we ‘know our stuff.’ (e.g., Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo)
• We are hard workers and don’t tend to need a lot of help
• We are generally perceived as doers vs. leaders; specialists vs. managers.  In other words ‘worker bees’ vs. ‘queen bees.’
• We are underrepresented in the minority model of many companies.  Asian groups/networks don’t usually exist like they do for African American or Hispanic groups.  Therefore, we don’t tend to offer as much support to each other as we should.
• Many people aren’t clear what the term ‘Asian’ means.  For example Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.) or South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, etc.).  Usually when you say ‘Asian,’ people think of Oriental Asians.

I experienced the last point during the conference itself.  The next day after the From the Mouths of Men session, I was asking an African American woman a question in the lobby area, and she said something like ‘weren’t you the one wearing that bright blue shirt that spoke on behalf of the Asian group?‘  I say ‘yes‘ and she said ‘the first thing that crossed my mind was: why is she up there, she’s not Asian!’  I smiled and said that’s why people don’t know what to do with us South Asians!  But hey, I wouldn’t want to be anything else. 😉

Next up on the conference:

• Julia Hubbel and The Hub Factor
• Summary – JP Morgan Chase

Subscribe to Comments Issue Fixed – Sort of
Sep 1 2007

We have been struggling with some WordPress and WordPress Plugin issues for some time now (see here, here, here, and here) and we think we have finally come to some sort of manageable work around for the one that has taken the most time to figure out: Subscribe to Comments.  Since Randa at Randa Clay Design first told me where to get the plugin when I asked the question on an eMoms at Home post, we have been trying to figure out how to make it work.  The first step was to move to a self hosted blog, which we did.  Then all of a sudden I wasn’t getting email notifications when someone was posting on the blog.  We just figured that out recently.  I was desperate for answers and we scoured the web and put a question on the WordPress.org Support Forums that never got answered and we later discovered was deleted.

I happened to attend an Austin Socia Media Club meeting where the infamous William Hurley spoke on open source software.  Honestly, I didn’t know who he was or if he was famous or infamous before I attended…but apparently he’s quite famous.  I liked his presentation style.  He asked us if we knew what he was there to talk about and only about 3 people raised their hands.  I did not raise my hand because I don’t know much about OSS.  Instead of being offended, he seemed relieved because it made his create on-the-fly Powerpoint presentation even easier to give. 

He asked us to raise our hands and throw out our questions which he then put on separate slides in order to address them one by one…which was refreshing.  I, of course, asked him about WordPress and he affirmed our observation that generally you never get a satisfactory answer from the forums.  He said one time at band camp he left what he thought was a reasonable question on a forum and got a response that said something like ‘you moron, you suck, you don’t know anything, you shouldn’t be allowed to own a computer.’  He replied trying to clarify his question and he was promptly denied access to the forum from there on out.  This story makes me feel better about my often probably dumb questions.  Another person asked him ‘why are OSS developers such Haters’ and he basically said that many of them a) don’t have any social skills or b) believe everyone should have the same god-like knowledge they do.

William (who goes by whurley) works at BMC and blogs at opensville was nice enough to offer to send our issue on to the WordPress guys he knows.  Fortunately I think we figured it out before he had a chance to forward the email on to them because otherwise we would have had a lot of HATE coming our way!

OK, so enough with the background, here’s how we got the Subscribe to Comments Plugin to work.  My genius husband, Erin, poked around the code in the subscribe-to-comments.php file.   He commented out a piece of the code and replaced it with new code as he noticed that the errors were coming from our email server.  Note that we are running WordPress 2.2.2 on a Windows Server 2003R2 computer with IIS 6.0 and PHP5. The code now reads as follows. 

For the non-technical folks: when you put “//” in front of a line it becomes a ‘comment’ and not active code.  This way if you ever come back to the code you have some idea of what changes were made or what functionality you were trying to achieve.  Erin probably documents better than 90% of the coders out there mostly because he doesn’t code that often. 🙂

So now you’d think our blogging prayers were answered.  But wait, the next day I go to Edit and/or Create a post and I am only able to see the Code view.  Since I’m not a coder, it’s imperative I have a working Visual view to create or edit my posts.  After asking me several times if I did something or someone else did something, Erin stated a few times that maybe someone hacked our site.  Of course, I then get anxious and wonder who would want to hack our site and how could they do that (i.e., pelted him with questions).  He then gets annoyed with me when I say maybe it has something to do with the Subscribe To Comments fix we did.  He loudly tells me there’s no way what we did could affect posting and I said ‘why not?’  He said because it’s two different sets of code and starts his ‘don’t you know anything’ tone of voice.  I then quietly deactivate the Plugin and all of a sudden I am able to see the Visual view.  Oh it was a very sweet feeling when I told him I could now do my posts like I usually do.  It most likely did not have anything to do with his code changes but with the Plugin itself, but nonetheless I had to smirk a little.

So I hope our pain will result in someone else’s gain if they happen to be experiencing the same issue.  So now, I have to deactivate the plugin when I work on a post and reactivate it when I’m done!  So that’s why I said in the title that it’s fixed – sort of. 🙂

Happy Labor Day everyone.  If you are wondering why I’m blogging so late on a Saturday night it’s because Erin went to the first UT Longhorn football game of the season.  The kids went down by 8:30 p.m. (after much negotiation with my son) so I said to myself now is a great time to blog.  He just emailed me from his Crackberry to tell me they won but not by the number of points they were supposed to.  So now he’s worried how they will perform in their next game against a team that is supposedly better than the team they played today.  Hook ‘Em!

Success To Me – Robb Lanum
Aug 31 2007

As some of you may know, I co-write articles on the topic of success for university alumni magazines with my wonderful writing partner Pam Losefsky. Our latest article for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, is about Robb Lanum, a husband, father of two and a writer with published script credits to his name. Robb blogs at the Robblog.  Our goal with this endeavor is to get people thinking about what success means to them by reading about how others define success. Click here to see additional articles we have written.

A correction: The Alcalde gave me credit for taking the picture of Robb, but I did not take it since I live in Austin, TX and he lives in sunny CA.  We conducted the interview over the phone.  His lovely and very talented wife, Michelle Campion, took it. 😀

Baby Tip by Babble Soft – Co-sleeping
Aug 30 2007

I know that people have strong opinions about co-sleeping but we found a happy medium.  I strongly recommend using a co-sleeper that attaches/sits next to your bed for several months after baby is born.  We used the Arm’s Reach Original Co-sleeper with both of our children.  With our son we placed it right next to our bed.  First on my husband’s side because I was recovering from a c-section so when he was hungry my husband would give him to me so I could breastfeed him.  Later we moved it back to my side but I wasn’t able to get any sleep because he moved so much so we moved him back to my husband’s side. 

Our son was in the co-sleeper for probably close to 8 months.  We started transitioning him to the crib around 6 months but it took us about 8 months to get him used to his crib.  For several months he woke up so often that it was easier for us to keep him in our room. (This waking up every few hours sadly continued until he was over 3 years old…he still wakes up to this day.)  

When our daughter was born, we put the co-sleeper at the foot of the bed (because we had a different bedframe and there was no footboard).  This minimized the disturbances from movement that all of us experienced.  She slept so well that we transitioned her to the crib at about 5 months.  She is still a dreamy sleeper.  Thank GOODNESS!  The Co-sleeper also makes a great pack-n-play which we have used often.  We still use it when we have visitors (because they stay in the guest room where her crib is) or when we go stay overnight with people who don’t have a crib or pack-n-play for her to use.  It’s easy to assemble…not so easy for me to break down…but the positives drastically overwhelm the breaking down challenges.  If you are thinking of co-sleeping, I encourage you to get a co-sleeper.  Some people are comfortable sleeping with a baby in their bed but personally, I was downright nervous or shall we say petrified that one of us or the pillows/blankets would accidentally hurt them.

***

Note to new readers: these tips are based on our experiences, as well as those of our friends and readers. Please always consult with your doctor before implementing any tip that might impact the health of your baby. If you have a tip you’d like to submit please send an email to babblesoft blogger for possible inclusion. Please check the ‘baby tips’ category to make sure your tip (in some form or fashion) hasn’t already been posted. If it has been, feel free to comment on that post and support the tip. We also welcome respectful challenges to the tips because as is noted in our inaugural baby tip ‘everything is relative!’ We will, of course, give anyone who submits a tip we publish credit and a link back to their site!

Comments Now Working and Fortune Cookies
Aug 29 2007

Thanks to my rocket scientist hubby (yes, he really is a rocket scientist), you can once again contribute your deep, insightful comments on my deep, insightful (uh huh) blog posts.  Apparently, the comments.php file got corrupted so we replaced it with the original and voila now it works.  We also figured out the comments issue we had related to not receiving emails when someone commented. It was an oversight on our part…we didn’t realize that after installing the ShiftThis.net plugin, we had to put an email address in the SMTP page under the Options tab.  Doh!  To our credit though we didn’t happen upon the right documentation during our prior searches.  I guess since we didn’t know what words to search on we picked the wrong ones.  I’m sure the WordPress.org support forum people hate us but honestly we had no idea and no time to figure it out. Still slogging through the Subscribe To Comments Plugin issues though.  Our fortunes today might be the reason we can’t fix it today.  There is always tomorrow to try again. 🙂

On another note, we experienced some bad lunch time fortune cookie mojo today at FireBowl Cafe.  Some other friends of ours have told us they got some weird ones at Pei Wei too.  Usually, we get some lighthearted, fun, cool fortunes but now they are buying theirs from another company (maybe the Chinese companies responsible for all the lead paint in our kids toys also make fortune cookies) that are downright yucky.  Here are the ones we got today…we got 2 more than normal to hopefully override the bad vibes from the first set.

• Today has been a disastrous day.  If you can’t beat them join them.
• Anything you do today is bound to fail (can’t remember this one exactly but this is what we recall.)
• There may be a crisis looming, be ready for it.
• A couple of extra bucks could be floating in your direction. (this one was at least somewhat positive)

All I have to say is YEESH!  Not a good thing for China…

Baby Manager User Story – Erika’s Family
Aug 28 2007

To help illustrate how different people use Baby Manager, we have worked with some of our users to create touching, heart-felt user stories.  I am grateful to the families who are willing to share their time, pictures, and energy to write/edit these case studies with us!  To see our other user stories please check out our Testimonial page or click on the case study tag.

Erika’s Family: (pdf)

Mother:  Christa (Marketing Entrepreneur)
Father:   Robert (Software Developer)
Baby:     Erika
Born:     July 2, 2007
Place:    Austin, Texas

Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0


Situation
Christa and Robert both love technology and use it to help manage their lives so they acquired a subscription for Baby Manager before their baby arrived.  They started using it about 5 days after Erika was born because Christa was having challenges with breastfeeding.  She was experiencing unbearable pain so she began feeding Erika only on one side and pumping the other.  After a meeting with her lactation consultant and pediatrician, Christa discovered the reason for her pain was that Erika was severely tongue-tied.  When she discovered this, she quit breastfeeding and went exclusively to pumping until it could be corrected.  She used Baby Manager to keep track of her pumping and Erika’s bottle-feeding activities to make sure she pumped enough milk for Erika. When Erika was 9 days old, she went in for surgery and within hours afterwards Christa was back to breastfeeding.  Since her milk supply had decreased while she was exclusively pumping, it was imperative for her and Robert to make sure she was keeping up with Erika’s needs by pumping and breastfeeding regularly.  Baby Manager helped them keep up with all of the activities.  Before meeting with her lactation consultant, Christa would print out breastfeeding and pumping reports as well as bottle-feeding reports from Baby Manager.  She and her lactation consultant reviewed the reports together and looked for patterns related to pumping, amounts, and how much Erika was taking from a bottle. In late August 2007, Christa started the transition back to work (part-time) and will continue to use Baby Manager to keep track of her feeding and pumping.  She already has a computer set up at home for her nanny to use Baby Manager.  Christa or Robert can log in from work and see how little Erika is doing at home. 

Christa and Robert’s Experience:
Baby Manager has been a tremendous help!  It enables us to be very organized with little effort and much reward. We use Baby Manager to: 

• Easily monitor how often and for how long Erika is breastfeeding
• Track how frequently and how much I am pumping
  • Initially so I could see progress on increasing my milk production
  • Now to make sure I consistently pump each day to store milk for when I go back to work
• Run reports and see trends in feeding lengths each day, the number of bottles versus breast feeding, and more
• Remind me which side she fed on last (which is great for those feedings when I’m half asleep and can’t remember!)
• Track when we give her gripe water so we keep it adequately spaced apart 

—End—

If you are interested in participating in your very own user story, please activate a FREE Trial.  If you find Baby Manager works for you, you want to tell the world about your great experience using it, and you are interested in being a part of our media campaign, please email us at blogger at babblesoft dot com for more information and a hook-up.  It’s not as big as the Harpo Hook-Up by Oprah, but it just might be what you need. 🙂