Month: October 2008

Do Over

By / October 8, 2008 / 2 Comments

Sometimes we get second chances to do something right.

Patch had his days mixed up. Yesterday was not Walk To School Day. Today was. This time I planned for it. Patch got to ride his bike to and from school with a couple of friends. He thought it was the best day ever.

This is our fourth major book shipping event. Usually I spend a week or more prior to the event so stressed that I can’t even see straight. The children are shunted aside so that I can get the work done. This time I have done a much better job of balancing the work and the business stuff. A part of each day has belonged to the children. This is good also.

Tomorrow is the big shipping day. Hopefully I’ll be able to track down the AWOL flat rate priority mail boxes and all else will go as planned.

This week in a nutshell

By / October 7, 2008 / 2 Comments

The daily schedule for this week:

Get up, pay attention to kids, get them off to school
Work on postage printing, and shipping stuff until my brain completely shuts down.
Welcome kids home from school, make sure I reinforce the things that are happening at school because I’m in the process of helping two kids make course corrections.
Try not to get snippy at the noise of joyful play.
Make dinner, manage homework time, put kids to bed.

The shipping days and book release party are Thursday and Friday. I think sanity/relaxation are somewhere on the far side, but it is kind of hard to see from here.

Walk To School Day

By / October 7, 2008 / 4 Comments

I waved to Gleek and Link as they took off on their bikes to school, then turned to Patch.

“Hurry Patch. It is time to get into the car and go to school.”

Patch stopped in his tracks with a shocked look on his face. “But Mom! It’s walk to school day!”

It was indeed Walk To School Day. The green note came home yesterday along with a green ribbon for kids to tie to their bikes or backpacks. I’d forgotten about the note. I looked at the clock. Ten minutes until school start. The walk would take 20-30 minutes. I looked at Kiki, who had missed her bus and needed me to drop her off right after I dropped of Patch. I thought about the pile of work sitting in my office. I looked down at Patch. He was wearing a blue ball cap found in the closet this morning. The cap was too big for him. It came down to his eyebrows and over his ears. This had the effect of making his eyes seem huge. Those blue orbs were pleading with me. I knelt in front of him.

“Honey, there isn’t time to walk…”

Patch’s face crumpled and tears dripped from his eyes. Missing Walk To School day was a major tragedy for this small person. I’d no idea that it was so important to him, or I would have planned the morning differently. I frantically thought for a solution. If Kiki had not missed her bus, I would just have walked Patch to school. He would have been late, but happy…and tired. That’s a pretty long walk for five year old legs. I probably would have ended up carrying him for part of the trip. What Patch really needed was a short walk that ended with his arrival at school.

“How about this, I’ll drive you most of the way to school. Then we’ll let you out so you can walk the last bit?”

Patch considered. This plan would still let him cross streets with the crossing guard like all of the big kids. He nodded his agreement to the plan. We carefully tied the green ribbon to his backpack and hurried out to the car. About a block from the school, I stopped and let Kiki and Patch out of the car. He looked so small with his oversized hat and backpack. She looked so tall and grown-up walking beside him. In a moment I would have to drive on ahead of them to the school, so that Kiki could jump back into the car and be delivered to junior high. But for just a minute I watched the two of them walking down the street together. My oldest and my youngest, holding hands and going for a walk.

I’m glad I could make my little boy happy today.

Holiday card

By / October 6, 2008 / 1 Comment

This morning I found a surprise in our post office box. An online acquaintance, with whom I’ve exchanged email several times, sent us a holiday greeting card. My first though was “wow, this is really early.” Then I looked closer and saw that the card was wishing us “Eid Mubarak.” I looked at the faces smiling up at me. I realized that this family had reached out to my family to share their joy in a celebration, and I wasn’t even sure what the celebration was for. Google lead me to several sites filled with information. “Eid Mubarak” is a traditional greeting meaning “Good Festival” It is very commonly used at the end of the month of Ramadan which ends with the three day feast Eid al-Fitr. I have not yet had time to delve into the deeper meanings of these holy days, but I intend to. Receiving this card made me realize that I don’t know enough about this way of life that is shared by over a billion people worldwide.

I hung the card on our wall in the same place that I hang Christmas cards in December. It makes me happy to see the card there. Also I want my kids to see this smiling, obviously American family, who celebrates Islamic holidays. The kids have already asked about the card and I’ve given them the information I gleaned from the internet. I also shared what I know about the family from the communications we’ve had. I think that perhaps this year at Christmas time, I will read my children stories about other holy days as well as the ones we celebrate. That would be good for us all I think.

praise

By / October 5, 2008 / 10 Comments

Last week I did two interviews about Hold on to Your Horses. Both interviews were very complimentary to me and to the book. It was heady to have so many intelligent people telling me how amazing I was for creating this book for my daughter and then sharing it with others. Yet, after both interviews I could not wait to get home and change back into my mommy clothes instead of my professional clothes. I was subtlely disturbed by something about the interviews and it took me awhile to figure out what it was.

The cumulative message from the interviews was “we know you’re an amazing mother because you wrote this book.” As if writing a children’s book is a good measure of parenting prowess. The fact that I wrote a children’s book and shepherded it through publication says things about my writing and publication skills. It says nada about me as a mother. I would be much more comfortable receiving praise about my mothering skills from someone who watched the hours I spend snuggling and cooking and remembering food preferences and dropping off at school and supervising homework. Those are all tasks that will never win me a television interview, but they are far more important to being a good mother than writing a book is. In writing Hold Horses, I’m only doing what hundreds and thousands of other parents do every day. I am using the resources I have to help my children grow. It seems wrong that I’m getting praise and attention merely because I’ve got a flashier set of resources to turn to the aid of my child.

It feels wrong for me to seek out this praise and yet the praise is an inevitable part of promoting this book. I need to continue promoting the book. I still want to be able to pay Angela what her work is worth. I still believe that this is a story that can help other families as well as mine. I guess I just have to keep going, but I wish I could share the praise with other mothers who work even harder than I do with less reward.

Shipping Phase 4: Printing Postage

By / July 8, 2011 / 25 Comments

Phase 1: Collecting orders
Phase 2: Sorting
Phase 3: Inventory preparation

Phase 4: Printing Postage

This is the point at which we start to spend serious money. We have to purchase over $10,000 of postage in order to get all the packages to their destinations. The service I use to print our postage is Stamps.com. I have to pay a monthly fee and download a program to my computer, but once that is done, I have the ability to print mailing labels and matching postage with my printer at home.

First I have to move the address data from the online store system and into the stamps.com application. Unfortunately these two pieces of software are unable to communicate with each other meaningfully. Fortunately they both are compatible with Microsoft excel. So I download the address data into a csv (comma separated value) file. Then I upload the csv into the stamps.com application. The stamps.com app automatically sorts the names into alphabetical order. This is why the final step of the sorting phase is alphabetizing by name.

I grab a list from my filebox. Lets say it is a list of people who have ordered a single book and they all want Petey as their sketch, also they’ve chosen Parcel Post as their shipping method. There are about 40 of these orders. I flip through the paper invoices, checking the boxes in the stamps.com app for the names that match the invoices. Stamps.com verifies all the addresses and sometimes suggests corrections. Most of the corrections are things like changing “Avenue” to “Ave” or adding additional digits to the postal code. I then select the appropriate shipping method and package weight. I make sure the labels are loaded into the printer, then I click print. The labels print. I clip them to the stack of invoices and put them back into their slot in the file box. Then I proceed to the next list.

As the labels are printed, the cost for each label is deducted from the credit I have on file with Stamps.com. When the balance reaches zero, I have to buy more postage. Fortunately they have a credit card on file and so I can purchase more postage with a few clicks. Again I am working with a system that is not designed for what I’m trying to do. Stamps.com will not allow me to purchase more than $250 of postage credit with them. When I am printing postage for a big shipping, I’ll purchase additional postage many times in a short space of time. Purchasing $3000 of anything in $200 increments, looks suspicious to a credit card company. Right around the $3000 mark, the company will place a hold on my card. This is a major reason why I have to start printing postage a week in advance of the shipping day. I have to leave time for the phone calls necessary to get the hold removed from the credit card. Twice. The first hold is removed by the use of an automated system. The second hold shunts me to a human being who asks me all sorts of identity verification questions. I then explain that we will be buying a huge amount of postage over the next few days and would they please stop interfering. Then they put a manager-approved “Do not hold” order on the card, which lasts for about a week. We do not carry this postage as a balance on our card. I pay off the amounts the same day I make the charges.

The other reason I start printing postage a week in advance is because of the international orders. Stamps.com has the ability to print out customs forms, but they can not be done in batches. Each form must list the contents of the package and be formated for the country to which the package is being sent. This requires me to hand enter information for each order. It is still much better than having to write customs forms by hand, which is how I used to do International orders. Each international order takes about a minute to process. There are about 300 international orders. This means a solid 5 hours of work for me to get all of them printed. International orders are not printed on stickers. They are printed on paper which then has to be folded or cut and shoved into clear sticker pouches that will be affixed to the exterior of the packages. The cutting and stuffing is another few hours. All of it must be done carefully to make sure that the right customs form stays with the right invoice.

When I am done with all the postage printing. I have two file boxes full of paper which cost me over $10,000 and yet none of it is redeemable for anything except packages going through the mail. I am extremely careful with those boxes until the next stage, Phase 5 Packaging and Mailing.

Daily To Do list

By / October 2, 2008 / 3 Comments

The following is a list of things that I feel I should be doing every day, times are approximate and they’re in no particular order:

Sleep 8 hours
Fix and eat 3 meals 2 hours
Supervise homework time 40 minutes
Bedtime snack/story time 30 minutes
Reading with Patch 20 minutes
Talking with Kiki 30 minutes
Talking with Link 30 minutes
Talking with Gleek 30 minutes
Talking with Patch 30 minutes
Helping Link practice physical skills 10 minutes
Listening to Link read aloud 20 minutes
Household chores 1-2 hours
Gardening/outside time 1 hour
Exercise 30 minutes
Answer email 1 hour
Process and ship new store orders 40 minutes
Other Schlock work 2 hours
Blog 30 minutes
Spend time with Howard 1 hour

If you total all of that up, it comes to 22 hours and 40 minutes. This leaves me an hour and 20 minutes per day to manage all those little incidental events like driving kids to and from lessons, sibling conflict, Parent teacher conferences, grocery shopping, keeping in touch with friends, relaxing. My expectations of myself are impossible. I know they are. About the best I can do is hit most of the important things on most days. And yet I some days I still feel like a failure because I didn’t do all of it that day.

Parent teacher conferences

By / October 1, 2008 / 2 Comments

Sometimes parent teacher conferences are nothing more than me and a teacher smiling at each other and agreeing that we both like my child. That means everything is going well. Other conferences consist of me and the teacher puzzling over a problem and outlining a solution. Then there are the conferences where the teacher and I spend time commiserating, but neither of us knows how to get a handle on the issue. In today’s conferences, I had one of each. Patch is taking to kindergarten like a fish takes to water. Link has been marking time at school without working so that he can get home and do the things he really cares about. His teacher and I have figured out how to corner him and require him to work before he plays. Gleek has two teachers who love her like I do, who see the same issues that I do, and who are as baffled as I am about how to help her with them. The rapport is nice, solutions would be nicer. Unfortunately I think that the solution is ultimately developmental. As Gleek matures, today’s major issues will disappear. They’ll probably morph into tomorrow’s issues, but if I spend time pondering that I will curl into a ball and cry.

In short, I’ve now got a newly expanded parenting “To Do” list. The thought makes me tired.