I got a killer piece of advice from Jaime when I was at Blogher. She said that her biggest mistake was getting all caught up in designing her display for the big trade show and she didn’t take the time to reach out to potential customers BEFORE going.

Brilliant.

Not that I was stressing about my display yet. Because it isn’t even September yet. Why think about something until you have to leave tomorrow?
Read the rest of this entry

Well, it appears I got ahead of myself again. You see, I have this little problem. When I make changes in my business, I tend to do several things at once. The result? Does anyone have any idea which thing worked?

This is what happened. I took the most adorable cocktail shakers to Blogher several weeks ago to give away as my swag. Cute, right? Then when I came back, I decided to give them away for a limited time as a promotion with purchase. Then I went one further and gave a substantial discount for purchase as well since I had offered a substantial discount on purchases
Read the rest of this entry

As I prepare to attend this trade show in September, the phone calls have begun. I have been inundated with calls about advertising in trade magazines, on websites, in commercials and as a featured advertiser. Everyone wants to sell me ad space. Who knew there was so much ad space out there?

I think it’s clear to anyone reading this blog that I am fairly new to this game. I started my business in 2006 on the internet. While my tees are now available in coffee shops and boutiques beyond Baby Brewing.com, mine has been a journey solely on the Internet Super Highway. I’ve advertised on blogs written by writers that shared my sense of humor and had a faithful readership. I’ve held contests
Read the rest of this entry

My friend Susie Sunshine has been riding me to update my Linked In profile. I have no idea why. To me it just seemed like another Facebook or MySpace. Which means, another place to check up on that really annoying girl from high school. Or your ex-boyfriend who ended up marrying that mousy girl with the same last name. Which I guess it made it easy for her to explain to her new mother-in-law that she was “keeping her name.”

That being said, Linked In is the new Twitter. Everyone is doing it.
Read the rest of this entry

Copyright/trademark law is a funny thing. Something I read just today said they are basically the same thing. Oh, Internet. You are such a jokester.

There was quite a bit of a broohaa on the internet this week when one person got feisty over another person using the derivative of ANOTHER, very famous blogger’s name who started blogging around the time Al Gore invented the internet. The derivation? Way back when I first read the person with the similar name, I thought that I personally wouldn’t have gone there. I mean, who wants to ever have to say, “No, I’m the OTHER Katherine Heigl.”
Read the rest of this entry

So I’m getting ready to go to the grand pappy of all trade shows for baby and kid items. Apparently no one has gotten the memo that my real seller is the Mommy Needs a Cocktail. Maybe I haven’t gotten that memo. Hmm. Either way, I’m going.

Trade shows are kinda like craft shows, only you don’t go home with any money. Unless your trade show is in Vegas and you think you can fit at least one leg into that crazy lucky lycra craps dress you wore back in the ’90s, when you were beautiful and very, very
Read the rest of this entry

This post could also operate under the title “how that Ad Guy Josh ran up my credit card bill.”

Every once in a while around the internet you will see one of these pictures.

It’s usually in the right column of one of my favorite mom blogs. I’ll pay for blogads because they are a great way to remind people that I am around. I have always recovered my cost. But sometimes you just want to go all out with advertising. Make it big. Someone emailed me the other day and suggested I go print advertising in a baby magazine. I emailed her back with a copy of the media kit that said a 2 inch by 2 inch ad running once in a baby magazine costs $60,000.

$60,000.

Explain to me who is operating with that kind of budget? Clearly a lot of people because baby magazines are filled with advertisements. OK, so apparently there is a whole world of much cheaper “remnant ads” available when they have space to fill at the last minute, but we are still talking thousands.

I’m a one woman show. Well, two women, if you count Susie Sunshine as Chief Correspondent Girl. “Thousands” is not a word that fits in my budget. But I do have this funky little undisclosed political t-shirt side business with my friend Melissa that needed a little advertising. I contacted Big Ad Agency about doing online advertising on a news website that gets traffic that makes Dooce’s traffic look like my traffic at Mommy Needs a Cocktail.

Josh is a salesman. Josh must be working on commission. I should know this. But I fell for his sexy voice.

J: We do CPM. This will be perfect for your t-shirts.

He explained the complex formula used so that people like my husband who refresh the page 9,000 times every day won’t be using up all my clicks. I called everyone I knew and told them they had to stay off the website for the next 3 days because I didn’t want to be wasting my 2 million clicks on someone who isn’t going to buy a shirt. My partner in crime in this endeavor called me to say she hadn’t seen the ad yet. I called Josh to make sure it was up and running.

J: I can see it right now.
K: Thanks, Josh. Can you get off the site? I want my click back.

He laughed.

I sat back and waited for the money to roll in. And waited. And waited. And waited. With three orders after 18 hours, I could only describe my mental state as horrified and panicked.

Josh wasn’t feeling my panic. Probably because my credit card payment had cleared.

J: Well, you can only figure out these things by trial and error.

Um, that trial and error is a mortgage payment, you loser. Let’s try to make me feel a little better about this. I swapped out my photo and raised my frequency.

And the orders started flying into my inbox. At the end of my 72 hours, I had made my money back plus some more to fund our next advertising scheme.

But the 10 years of my life I lost from worrying that we had thrown the money down the toilet? I’d like that back. Lucky or brilliant? I’m not sure. You have to know your audience, realize that it may fall flat and identify your goals. So I didn’t make millions but Would I do it again? Someday I’ll tell you about that time I rolled an eight six times in a row at the craps table in Vegas…

When I was pregnant with The Baby, I can’t tell you how many people asked me if I had lost my mind.

“You are going to have two in diapers. On purpose.”

The funny thing is, I know myself fairly well. I’m not one of those moms who keeps getting knocked up because she LOVES babies. I have a friend who loves babies so much that she swears she will have 9. She says she can’t help herself. Me? Not so much. All those days of wondering if I was a total idiot because I have done everything I can think of and he is still crying. Those days when you hold them all day and they still don’t stop? What now? And then you cross that line and suddenly they TELL you what they want. It’s awesome. Even if what they want is 30 popsicles.

So I got lucky and was able to stack my babies on purpose. Believe me, I know I am lucky that it worked out that way. But I knew that for me, if I got a breath of freedom for just one moment, if it started to get what I perceived as “easier,” The Boy would have been an only child. Seriously. If only for the reason that it actually got HARDER than before but I was already pregnant again. That shipped had sailed.

Which means that now that the babysitter Bob the Builder can keep an eye on The Boy for a half hour while I get my act together, I now have a 16 month old who cannot, if his life depended on it, stay out of my stuff and out of my way. Yesterday he fell into a screen filled with brown ink. He looked up at me with his best, “How the heck did that happen” look and I looked at him with my death ray eyes. I JUST HAD ONE MORE SHIRT TO SCREEN PRINT. I turned around and he was standing on the counter. Danger? The Boy told me he was going to move all the stools out of the room so The Baby would be safe. The Baby took all the stools and pushed them back in the room and climbed back up on the counter.

“MOMMY!!!!!!!!!!”

Sometimes I think it might be better that I didn’t get a “break.” I mean, now I don’t know what I am missing, right?

I have a friend who says this exact same thing every single time I talk to her.

She moved away a few years ago but every once in a while we call each other up to see what’s up. She tells me what’s going on in her life and I tell her what is going on in mine. Without fail, she says, “I just don’t know how you do it.”

This is my friend that called me when her baby was four weeks old because she was bored out of her skull. Not the baby, the mother. She had just finished repotting all her plants and was well on her way to alphabetizing her bills. I am not lying. This fascinated me. When I had The Boy, I took that whole “sleep when the baby sleeps” to heart. For the first six months of his life, I had two naps a day. I was exhausted all the time. So this is my friend who had a baby a couple years after mine and she’s unflappable. And she wants to know how I do it every day.

This always cracks me up. It cracks me up because I feel like every single day I’m doing it even more half-assed than ever. A toddler, a preschooler and an ever growing business. I never admit to my friend that Dora used to be my best babysitter but then Bob the Builder gave her the boot in the Tivo smackdown. But now? Now that toddler has his legs. It is officially OVER yet again. Take this morning, for instance.

The phone rang as I was printing up shirts this morning. Printing up a shirt for a woman whose order was lost in the mail. I have apologized profusely for the Postal Service (and I thought those days were over) but this leaves me rushing to beat the clock of her must-have attire for a vacation. I answered the phone as I caught The Baby pulling off the top to the silver glitter ink.

“I’m calling about your shipping account with us. Is this a good time to call?”

Yeah, there is no such thing. Then The Boy walked into the room.

TB: Mom.Mom.Mom.Mom. Danyelle just called on your cell phone. I already talked to her. She wants you to call her.
K: You are three. What are you doing answering my phone?
TB: Mom. I ANSWERED your phone. I was watching my videos on your phone and it rang. You should call her back.
K: Well, thanks. You can be my new secretary. Wait, what videos were you watching?

The last time he helped himself to my I-Phone, he sent everyone in my inbox a Timbaland video from YouTube. Thank GOD it was that and not… Well, we all know what’s floating around on YouTube these days.

I turned around to find The Baby with fingers covered in silver ink. He was repainting my workshop with the silver ink. He had the glee of a bunch of 4th graders who have found a broken thermometer and are swirling a mound of mercury in their hands. Except we didn’t KNOW that mercury could kill us. Well, that and the silver ink is harmless.

I grabbed The Baby’s hands and wiped them furiously with paper towels. I turned around to find The Boy hanging on the end of the dryer, having successfully stopped the belt that is running shirts through to cure the ink. I look in to see a shirt smoking inside.

K: STOP!!! I MEAN, START THAT BACK UP.

The Baby runs past me to turn the belt completely off. Not the heater, just the belt. I turn it back on, he turns it on high. His brother comes around the dryer and jumps on my back. I am now holding both of them as I am crouched down, aiming a temperature gun in the dryer to see if the shirt has cured.

The phone rings again.

“We’d like to talk to you about your long distance service. Is this a good time?”

Yeah, I don’t know how I do it either.

This weekend I sold my shirts at a local city fair. I always get a bit of a reaction from my Mommy Needs a Cocktail line and every so often it isn’t always positive. I’m cool with that. Some mothers rear their children all while never having a drop of alcohol touch their lips. My intent isn’t to offend, but I certainly don’t expect everyone to appreciate my stunningly fabulous sense of humor. To me Mommy Needs a Cocktail doesn’t mean you need to drink a fifth of scotch before breakfast in order to make it through the day. Although finding 6 packs of Forever stamps stuck to everything other than mail today might make me reconsider. But it really is just a joke. It’s supposed to lighten your mood for those Forever stamps days.

Recently I explained to someone who asked about the name “Mommy Needs a Cocktail” that it is that exact time of the day when you have just simultaneously cleaned the green paint off your blue carpet and chewed your three year old out for what I believe we are calling “poor choices” these days only to turn around to find your 1 year old has had the green paint the entire time you have been cleaning and has now redecorated the dining room floor as well.

Mommy Needs a Cocktail. She doesn’t have to pour herself one at 1:30 p.m. but it’s safe to say she needs one.

But Monday I got a reaction that I had never had before when an attractive single guy walked up with his much younger girlfriend. He looked like someone I would have dated in my former life. Devilishly attractive, executively employed, not quite as brilliant or funny as he thinks he is.

Guy: MOMMY NEEDS A COCKTAIL?
K: Um, yeah.
Guy: What’s that?
K: Um, mommy. needs. a. cocktail.

I flashed to Winona Ryder in Reality Bites. The definition of “irony” being something that is ironic.

Guy: (laughing) Well, that just sends out the wrong message.
K: And what message would that be?
Guy: If mommy needs a cocktail, then she really needs to get herself a job and drop some weight.

He then ran. Which I think was a brilliant move on his part. If you are a conscientious objector, I get it. If you are talking out of your, well, you know, you are opening yourself up for mockery on the Internet. I thanked him for the blog material as he ran away.

The title of this post was what I said to him. What would you have said?