Happy Mother’s Day 2013
May 12 2013

Another year has passed and another Mother’s Day is almost over.  Apparently my Happy Mother’s Day 2012 – Keep Up The Good Work post had several hundred views the last few days via google searches.  I still find that “greeting” card I took a picture of and put in that post humorous in an ironic kind of way…not even sure that makes sense or not.

This Mother’s Day, we find ourselves living in an extended stay hotel for a couple of weeks while we wait for our new home to be ready.  We’ve already had several friends over to eat and swim with us. Our new home was supposed to be ready in January, and we are crossing our fingers & toes that we will be able to move in soon.  So many amazing things have happened on this journey and invariably they involved wonderful people with big hearts who have gone the extra mile to make this transition as smooth as possible given the other unexpected changes in my life.  I really can’t thank some of these people enough.  I’m pretty sure I’ll be a grandmother with some of the best First World war stories ever!  🙂

So today for Mother’s Day, my son played soccer, the kids did their homework, they took me to Firebowl for lunch where mom’s ate free, we saw The Croods, they went swimming in the heated & nicely shaded hotel pool, they took me to Macaroni Grill for dinner (using gift cards the buyer’s of our house gave us), and they listened to me 90% of the time without me having to repeat myself multiple times.  All in all I’d say it was a very good day with the only downer being me having a cold.

I told the kids that I would share the fortunes (or statements) from the fortune cookies we chose at Firebowl in this post, so Happy Mother’s Day and here they are :

• Embrace change, don’t battle it.
• Don’t be so critical and overly concerned about details.
• Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens.
• Drastic means are not as necessary as you think.
• Hard work pays off in the future, laziness pays off now.
• Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent.
• Help people reach their full potential.

Happy Mother’s Day 2012 – Keep Up The Good Work
May 12 2012

Happy Mother’s Day to all you fabulous mothers out there!  Being a parent and especially a mother these days is probably one of the hardest jobs on the planet.  Unlike an OB doctor, who can be liable for a kid’s physical health until they are 18 or sometimes 21, mother’s can be blamed or praised for their kids successes or failures until they die.

I have been blessed with great women friends who are amazing mothers.  Most of the older women I know have stood by their now mostly-out-of-the-nest kids through many ups and downs even if their own parenting styles and home situation might have had an impact on some of the “down” parts.  They realize they aren’t perfect and don’t expect their kids to be perfect either.

It’s not easy being an adult and raising kids when you sometimes feel like breaking down from exhaustion and other things because you are still trying to figure out life and yet you’re expected to model the best for them.  Most of the time motherhood is the greatest thing since sliced bread but sometimes you wonder how those little babies turned into talking beings.  Some of us can keep it together better than others and are the poster children of great motherhood, some of us are extremely narcissistic, and some of us keep it together too well and have little emotional connection with our kids.

It’s easy to brag and boast about your kid when everything is going great and the world sees them as well behaved “darlings.”  It’s not so easy when things take a turn down the road of bad health, abuse, depression, drugs, alcohol, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, emotional issues, divorce, differences of opinion, lifestyle choices, etc.  But to those mom’s and dad’s who accept & love their kids for who they and are there for them despite the sometimes disappointment, pain, health issues, talking back, expressions of sadness & anger, and embarrassment, this post is for you.

The photo in this post is from a card I saw in a grocery store.  I found it so hilarious I had to take a picture of it.  Inside it says “Keep Up The Good Work.” 🙂

Happy Mother’s Day – 2011
May 7 2011

Happy Mother’s Day!  I hope all the mothers out there have a pleasant day tomorrow – May 8, 2011 – with kids not whining doting on you, listening to everything you say, and smiling all day. 🙂  If your kids are grown and if you’ve been a good mother, hopefully they’ll send you something or call you.  My kids are still young so I suspect they will give me something they made at school.  For one brief second I thought about writing a short Mother’s Day poem, but then I realized how late it was and changed my mind.  Being a mother has been the hardest, yet so far the most rewarding profession I’ve ever had.  I love my two little human start-ups (i.e., ventures) more than anything else in the world.  The mother-child relationship is the only relationship that starts with a human physically connected and constantly fed by another human.  I imagine I’ll always feel connected to them in some form even though the connection changes over time.  I hope I have as positive an affect on their lives as they have had on mine.

My neighbor shared some of her Mother’s Day roses with me today.  She said she had so many and she wanted to share some with me.  That was so very thoughtful and sweet of her, and I’m tearing up a bit writing about it now especially given the hard year we’ve gone through.  They are my favorite flowers: roses, which are shown in the photo accompanying this post.  I’m grateful for people like our neighbors who we’ve lived next to for over 10 years and who have been kind and supported all of us.  She’s a wonderful mother with 4 kids, and I think close to 10 grand kids now.  When she’s not working, she seems to be always doing something for her kids or grand kids.  Her husband is the wonderful guy who helped us plant our new trees, and he has also read my blog consistently since almost soon after I started writing on it over three years ago.  So I know he’ll see this post and hopefully tell her about it.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY 2011 to all.  Do your best to be great mothers every day and night (since it’s a 24×7 job) and hope your kids forgive you when you screw up as you will forgive them when they do…unless of course they forget mother’s day or your birthday!

Happy Mother’s Day
May 9 2010

May all you mothers out there be appreciated today (and every day for that matter) for all that you do.  There are too many things that we do to list here.  Although maternal and paternal roles have changed throughout the generations of humanity, the mother’s role is still very important not only from a biological perspective but also a psychological one.  As the saying goes, if mom is happy everyone’s happy!  My kids gave me lots of hugs and loving today and kept the whining to a minimum so I was a happy momma. 🙂

Happy Mother’s Day!
May 11 2008

Happy Mother’s Day!  I put this poem I wrote for Mother’s Day in a previous post, and wanted to share it again here.  I hope you enjoy it along with a picture taken by a good friend of mine, Sandy Blanchard.

Motherhood and Childhood

What does it mean to be a mother?
Is it love?
Is it fear?
Is it feeling dear?

What does it mean to be a child?
Is it love?
Is it joy?
Is it having a favorite toy?

As mothers we hope for our child’s happiness
We pray for our child’s health
We hope they are treated with kindness
We pray our children find peace in the world

As children we live for today
We anticipate a life of fun
We hope for a million tomorrows
We cannot imagine a world without our mothers

As mothers we cannot imagine a world without our children
We are one and the same…

Aruni Gunasegaram
March 2008

Moms Gone Viral
May 2 2008

I was planning to write a post updating everyone on our search engine optimization experience today but the real world injected itself with a sick kid at home.  High fever and rescheduling meetings doesn’t leave much time for writing long, heavy posts.  Plus I had to sneak in a nap in the afternoon while our daughter napped since we didn’t get much sleep the night before. 🙂

So instead, while my husband takes care of the kids this evening, I thought I’d write a post on the example of an unanticipated, viral marketing story with a mom twist.  So here it goes…

Once upon a time I met a friend on the Internet.  I found her blog and commented away.  After some time, we realized we had similar visions and she invited me do a guest post on her blog called Entrepreneurship: A Blessing or a Curse.  We kept in touch, spoke on the phone a few times about ways to work together, became twitter pals, and finally met in person at SXSW here in Austin back in March and clicked even more. 

While at SXSW she got further proof of what she already knew which was that the name of her blog, then called eMoms at Home, was not really reflective of the demographics of her readers and would-be readers so she had a mini-meltdown, picked herself up and came up with a cool new name called Sparkplugging!  Since she was and still is an advocate of entrepreneurs and especially those who work from home, her cool, new name opens the door wide open to many of us who are moms or not but like to spark up ideas and play with them until something happens.

So after SXSW, she went home and saw a post about dads on twitter and decided to do one for moms.  Within hours she got tons of replies and created a post called The Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter that started with 250 moms.  I commented and subscribed to comments on that post and every day new moms would leave a comment with their twitter name until May 1, 2008 that is.  Twitter sent out an email to everyone yesterday, May 1, and in it they included:

Mother’s Day: On The Way

We’ve noticed a trend of parents twittering the moments of their baby’s birth so we know there are some new moms on Twitter. Are you a mom on Twitter? Is your own mom on Twitter? Maybe you even made “The Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter”? Mother’s Day is just around the corner so don’t forget to @reply the moms you know with a thoughtful phrase–but keep it under 140 characters, moms are busy people.

List of Moms on Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/6cxgp5

And today I had 150+ comments in my inbox and they are still coming.  Now she has close to 400 comments on that one post! Did she do anything extraordinary to make it happen? Not really.  Did she tell people on twitter about it? Yes, of course.  Did she know others would tell and re-tell more people about the list? Possibly.  Did she know twitter would pick it up in their mass email to everyone? Doubtful (but I don’t know what went on behind the scenes).  So in hindsight what played in her favor to have a post she wrote on April 8 (before her name change) take on a life of its own?  Here’s what I think:

• She took the initiative to do something that ended up being quite time consuming, but she saw from the responses it resonated with hundreds of moms on twitter that it was a worthwhile endeavor. 
• She told her friends about it who re-tweeted and blogged about it. 
• The tweeters kept the link going within twitter and in the blogosphere. 
• Mother’s Day was around the corner and the guys (I think they are all men) at twitter saw the activity and might have said to themselves “Hmmm. How can we mention a major holiday, get brownie points with our wives/mothers, and promote twitter at the same time” and voila a mention was born!

UPDATE: I sent a link to @Biz to this post and he informed me there are several women who work at twitter!  So of course I followed them.  Here is his tweet: 

biz @aruni awesome! I included the moms list because it was noteworthy – also, women who work at Twitter: @crystal @krissy @alissa @lane @sara

In case you haven’t guessed who this friend is, it’s Wendy Piersall.  I guess only Wendy can tell us if she planned all of this, but to me it’s another example of viral marketing that in hindsight makes sense but when started, the current result would have been highly unpredictable. 

To me, this is why it is so hard to orchestrate a viral campaign.  You can plan everything down to the “t” and still not have it work out the way you wanted.  It’s hard to predict when there are so many variables.  You can also just do something you enjoy doing that helps others and see a “spark” turn into a flame!  Way to go Wendy! 😀

Oh and by the way, I am @aruni and Wendy is @eMom on twitter…

Happy Mother’s Day!
May 13 2007

Happy Mother’s Day from Babble Soft!  Our Mother’s Day special is still available through the end of May 2007.   I hope every mother is being treated like royalty this weekend.  On Saturday I took my son to his swim class, we went to a birthday party, I took a nap, then went to the mall (by myself!), and then my husband planned a date night for us.  It was nice going to the mall and having time to think about the things I wanted to buy, instead of having to make decisions in 5 seconds because one of the kids wants to be carried or is about to run off somewhere. 🙂  I went to Victoria’s Secret and bought some of my usual items (some on sale), bought some sunglasses from the $10/first pair, $5/second pair sunglass kiosk, and got some things for the kids at The Disney Store.  The Disney Store had beach towels (Nemo and Micky Mouse) for $9.99 each , and flip flops for $4 a pair!  I was feeling so good about my accomplishments, that I didn’t realize what time it was.  I had arrived at the mall around 5:00 pm and thought I had plenty of time…until my husband called to ask where I was.  I said “I’ll be home by 6:00 pm” and he said “it is 6:00 pm!”  I was surprised because I thought it was only 5:30 pm.  The girl at the Disney Store checkout laughed with me and helped me get out the door in a hurry!

After dinner at a nice local restaurant called Shoreline Grill, my husband got out his Blackberry and looked for jazz clubs.   We don’t get out much so we aren’t up to speed on the downtown club scene.  The place we went to is called The Elephant Room and it had a nice ambiance.  We got there around 9:00 pm, they said the band, Gnappy, would start at 9:30 pm, but they didn’t start until around 9:50 pm.  We had to leave at 10:00 so our baby sitters could go home.  We liked what we heard the 10 or so minutes we were there!  Maybe next time.

Today, we went with some friends for a nice brunch at Chez Zee.  They had balloon animals and face painting for the kids.  We came home and my husband took the kids across the street to play with the grand kids of one of our neighbors, and I was able to call my mom and have a nice mother’s day chat with her.  Both kids are napping now so I thought I’d take the opportunity to blog a little.

Happy Mother’s Day everyone!

Aruni