As we all know by now, all of our fantasies of parenthood don’t come true. I turned out to be a mom that didn’t read much with her kids. Sigh. Blame it on the exhaustion of being the mother of twins, push it off on being too worn down, cast the responsibility on the babysitter… Somehow, after all my visions of what kind of parent I’d be, I wasn’t the one to foster reading in my children.

Reading to my children somehow became a burden. It annoyed me that they pushed the pages to get to the next one, interrupted me with question after question, went on tangents unrelated to what I was reading. I tried in vain to imitate Mr Toad’s deep throaty voice and Ms. Spider’s high-pitched tone.   It flat-out annoyed me to read with my kids. I felt horrible about it. Awful, actually. I felt like a mommy failure. I needed help.

I went to the library and spoke with a woman at the Biblioteca Latinoamericana in San Jose, a library with one of the foremost bilingual collections in California. She told me to read the newspaper outloud to the kids. She told me to read Time magazine, read People magazine, read anything to the kids. She gave me permission to not read Dr. Seuss. I stood in front of this stranger and cried. Just read, she said. Read for my own joy and the kids will absorb the magic of words and reading. The angst I had over reading children’s books that were not enjoyable to me was coming through to my kids. What they needed, she taught me, was the feeling that mommy enjoyed reading — they needed to see me value reading and how reading envelops every part of society. That woman, that precious librarian, changed my life.

The first thing I did was start reading signs and headlines in the car to the kids. I read recipes outloud and my kids loved every second of it. I read the Yahoo! front page headlines outloud. And in Spanish, I read anything I could find. Most books were children’s books, but that’s about my reading level in Spanish. I started to see my children engage me in reading and from that I gained inspiration to read further.

Step two was to find children’s books that worked for the whole family.  The problem was that I had a slew of Disney-esque books or See Jane Run boardbooks (or rather: bored-books) — each of them less inspiring than the next.  I needed to fix this ASAP. My sister-in-law had bought books from a little company called Chinaberry and I thought I might be able to find interest in some of those books. I spent hours pouring through their website  finding alternative books that I found interesting. There were stories of native American children, of world cultures. There were books of children’s poetry that I found simply incredible and sweet. I found Goodnight Moon in Spanish, which was super fun for me to read with the kids. I bought Heather Has Two Mommies but it made me feel uncomfortable, so I ditched it. I found a book about Amelia Earheart and a wonderful book about buildings called Iggy Peck Architect. In finding books that interested me, I found that my kids were more interested in reading with me. That was a huge relief.

My third step was to acquiesce my mommy responsibilities in reading with the children. My partner @La_gringa took over the role of reading to the kids before bed. It turned out beautifully — the kids and @La_Gringa love this ritual.  My stepdad took it upon himself to buy a series of books he had enjoyed reading to his kids 30 years ago  (the great Ferdinand was one) and the kids know that Granddad will read to them whenever they visit. My mom sat with the kids while they learned to read in preschool and then kindergarten. Unlike me,  her patience for sounding out syllables was unwavering. The village had stepped in to raise up my children where I lacked.

The kids are now in first grade, are biliterate in Spanish and English, reading fluently in two languages above grade level. Most of their reading is non-fiction, which I find fascinating, and all of their exams are solely in Spanish. This week they both received  Accelerated Reader awards for earning over 90 percent on their tests — they were two of only 10 first-graders in their school honored. Despite me, these children have a passion for reading.

Teaching my children to read was so much harder than I ever dreamed. We had to adapt: Dr. Seuss was out,  Thomas the Tank was replaced with a how-to-build-a-train type books, written by people a lot less famous. I wasn’t the one that taught my children to read, but I did find a way to show them a respect and love for language. Last night my children listened as I read them a recipe — Sea Bass, olive oil, teaspoon of sea salt — while they retold a story from a Magic Treehouse book. The smells of the kitchen and conversation mutually engulfed us in the beauty of words.

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Whats a Sunner to do? If I was about to get laid off by Sun/Oracle, I would:

1. Beef up your Social Media personal brand. Add everyone you’ve got from your Sun/Oracle network. Join LinkedIn and start jabbering industry talk. I don’t mean gossip, I mean your.specific.expertise. Get inspired by Ryan Kuder’s Yahoo! Layoff – I’m not saying to Pull a Kuder, I’m just saying, get involved in the process of being layed-off. Be an adopter to an industry of job-seekers flooding the marketing from your former employer. Be real and honest and knowledgeable to your network about the merger, the layoffs and your recent need for a new gig. Get top of mind to the people you know (who could be potential employers) by using real-time communication tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

2. Remember, you are not a victim, you’re an (ex)employee. When the bubble burst here in Silicon Valley, all kinds of creative outlets popped up. My favorite were the LemonHeads. These folks had been layed-off and determined to make lemonade from their mutual predicament. They met at mountain biking trails around the Bay Area and rode hard. I thought it was brilliant: a cheap way to network! They talked about opportunities, referred one-another for gigs, talked industry to keep their minds sharp and got an endorphin rush from the exercise to feign off depression. You’re about to be layed-off, not because you were screwing the boss’s wife (or maybe you were, but that’s another If I… blog post), but because the industry is consolidating down to get lean and move forward. Call yourself the Rays of Sun or the Sunbeams or some positive-minded kitchy thing like that. Find something for you and your Sun buddies to do outside, something active and fun. Couldn’t you use a little fun right now?

3. Do not bash your former employer. Do I need to go on about this one? Sun and Oracle have been around a long, long time. There are some amazing products, incredible brains that have gone through those doors. Respect it. When I left Yahoo!, I still bled purple and yellow and I always will. I love the company that brought me so much learning, so many great colleagues, so much opportunity. Don’t write blog posts or cryptic mean tweets about the trade secrets or insider info or anything at all inflammatory to bash Sun and especially, not Oracle. Remember, Silicon Valley is a very small town and you don’t want to be the negative one shoveling fresh shit on an already steaming pile.

4. Don’t panic. Follow these steps (a) Clean up. Clean up your resume, your social media outlets, clean your desk drawer and your hard drive. (b) Breathe. The stress of layoffs sucks. Take time to get your mental house in order. Visit a friend, go camping, go on a road trip, let your kids play hooky from school and go to the beach to make sandcastles. (c) Make a plan. Where do you *want* to work? For whom? With whom? Where? Target where you want to be. (d) Get the book The Promise. I don’t care if you think it’s crap, it’s still inspirational. Visualize your next job, tell yourself It Will Be. And then be careful, because you might just get what you’re looking for.

So many companies, so little room in the market? Must.move.lighting.fast.always? Must throw it out there and fix it later? In the past several months I’ve seen companies go flying out the door before the products are fully baked. Ideas are never fully baked and online products are never done; as we all know, they simply evolve (if we’re lucky). But the belief in an ever-growing product isn’t the same as putting out a product to the public that isn’t ready.

If I were running product at a company that is in Alpha (even if it called itself in Beta), I would:

1. Withhold any and all traffic growing measures. If you’ve got a product that requires UGC in order to hammer out bugs, load test and populate pages then call your mother, your jobless cousins and your husband’s golf buddies. This isn’t the time to open up to random people. The web is simply too small now for that. Be clever about how to use the people you know. It’s old school, I know, but there’s a new reason: Real-Time Reporting. No longer do pages disappear. Everything now is available in real-time and opening up beta can produce half-completed pages, logins that spin, dead-end links or “this is where the ugly picture of yo baby goes” engineer placeholders. It’s just not worth it. Keep your content close and your content users closer.

2. Stop. Collaborate and Listen. Okay, fine, I’m stealing the line from Vanilla Ice and that’s just wrong. But he’s right. If you’re thinking of rolling into Beta do yourself a favor and stop everything. Take a breather. Take a weekend. Go back to your drawing board, away from the specs, away from the fancy UI corners and remember the product’s vision. Are you there? Are you there so strongly that you could push the product into Beta and go to sleep tonight not running MySql queries in your sleep? Have you listened to your team? Where’s the biggest worry? Is it valid? Is it a showstopper? Do you want to push to beta to get the Board off your back? To meet an arbitrary deadline? Take the moment. Stop. Collaborate. Listen.

3. Do not work any social media campaigns. No matter what. Sure, secure your FB fan page, get a Twitter account, play FourSquare, write a blog. But and this is a big but (not a big butt, which is a totally different rap song), do not waste the time or investment of a user when you are not yet ready to reciprocate. What can you offer users when you are not yet there yourself? Don’t tell me “Something Big is Coming!” because that’s not communicating with me. If you must engage social media into your pre-Beta plan, be completely transparent about your work. Tell a story of troubles and problems and issues and be fully prepared to offer the same kind of comfort in return to people you’re communicating with. The only thing I can honestly tell you to do in social media is LISTEN — comment on sites that matter to your business, pull in RSS feeds of sites that inspire your product and engage with them. Learn from them. But putting out a social media brand message takes dedication that Alpha products don’t have. Do you have it to give? If you don’t, save yourself the need of hiring me to fix the brand image and simply don’t engage until you are fully ready to put your best foot forward.

My bottom line is, don’t put up crap — your awesome idea is worth waiting a bit longer before taking it to Beta.

Note: Please give me some knuckles that I didn’t call out the names of the companies that led the inspiration for this post. <<good for me!>>

I’ve written about my own earthquake experiences before. I’ve written about my fear of fears before and trying to ensure my children are not fearful for the things we cannot control in life. But the fears they have over the disaster in Haiti are real and all around them. In response, I’ve come up with my kid checklist:

1. Safety first. All our kids in California go through earthquake drills at school. Make sure there is a plan for home. In our home we told the kids to go to the door jams and we would come to them. We told them not to run or hide or try to find us. We showed them where to go and how to protect their heads.

2. Mental safety. We told the kids that they lived in a safe house, built with safe materials. We told them that in Haiti houses were not built the same way. We ensured them that the disaster they see on TV (and everywhere) isn’t going to happen on that magnitude to their home or to their school. We patiently sat at the dinner table and answered questions to ensure they *felt* safe.

3. “I Don’t Know.’ Saying “I don’t know,” to questions about how big earthquakes will be here, will it happen at school, will the power go out, when will it happen all have one answer: I Don’t Know. That’s a hard thing to say to a child when they are fully reliant on you for answers. The only thing that helped the kids was when I told them they’d been through earthquakes, that mommy had been through big earthquakes that there will most certainly be earthquakes in the future and that I had always been safe, even in the worst scenarios.

4. Empower the munchkins. Both kids dumped out their piggy banks and gave most of their money to Haiti relief. They had no problem doing it. They were excited, actually. We also let them talk about Haiti, looked it up on the map, talked about their exports and what they might need (blankets, stuffies, Hersey’s Kisses). At dinner, Thing 1 asked if I could say a prayer for the children of Haiti. Since we don’t pray before our meals, I was pretty shocked. But we did it. It was his idea. He felt he was doing something to help. Thing 2 said she wanted to go teach the Haitians to fish because if you give them fish, they’ll only eat for a day. She takes the parable literally and wanted to go teach them to fish with her fishing rod so they could eat for a lifetime. The beautiful power of children.

5. Manage the media. Now, of course we’re all shielding our kids from the Haiti coverage, but really, look around. It’s simply everywhere right now. Try to manage what they see. No dead bodies. No blood. No famine. I let them see something about the airplanes coming in dropping food and water so they could see what the help is like. The positive side, if there is one, can’t be found as easy as the disaster of it all.

6. Get creative. We are going to have a Haiti garage sale. I’m going to try and get our whole street to do it. It won’t be this week or next, but probably in mid-March. The vast needs in Haiti will go on for years. I’d like to see something done where kids and families come together. The money will be sent to Haitian aid groups, but the Karma will be sent immediately.