In less exciting news, we went to a park, opened presents and cards, painted, worked on the pool some more, weeded the garden a little, thought about going out to dinner until we heard the wait would be at least an hour, and played the new games we bought for Siena, Chutes and Ladders and Candyland. Siena picked up very quickly on how to play, and has started losing with a little more grace than she did before with some other games. She also has a habit when she wins of then picking up the opposing piece and moving it to the finish and saying, “We both won!” which is really sweet.

First, Uncle Marcus was giving me a hard time when we had been asking both sets of grandparents to help look after the kids for the weekend. He and Aunt Ashlen have on many instances taken care of their kids on their own for multiple days at a time. He seems to think it’s not that hard. I must be doing something wrong, then, because I found it pretty challenging. Not impossible, obviously, but incredibly tiring and frequently stressful.

Once again I am in complete awe and amazement at what my mom had to do when Marcus and I were kids, when my dad was traveling and working for the Air Force (I’m in awe of that, too). Mo had to take care of two boys, no less, for weeks, let alone when Granddad went to Vietnam/Korea. I think I would go crazy after a week on my own with two kids this age; how she managed so many times I can’t really fathom.

On the other hand, I got an unexpected sense of satisfaction and accomplishment after making it to Monday morning without the kids suffering any real injuries, melt-downs, or other incidents of note. It felt good to know that I could get through the weekend. Sure it was only two days, but it was something I’d never done before, and it was reassuring to know I could get through it successfully, if not particularly interestingly.

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Dinner over the weekend always involved Siena having a “picnic” in front of the TV watching videos, this weekend mostly the first two episodes from the first season of The Muppet Show, and me either eating standing up in the kitchen while holding Thalia or sitting down feeding her and trying to get quick bites myself. When it’s just me and kids for dinner, I try to have a big lunch so I can skip dinner if time doesn’t allow. We ordered pizza Sunday night (navigating baby, Siena, two pizza boxes, a drink, and a bag of rolls through the mall parking lot was a challenge). I was surprised to discover two things about myself: (1) just how fast I can eat a piece of pizza when the situation demands, and (2) when anxious and in a hurry, I forget that the pucillo pizza contains mushrooms that need to be picked off.

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This was true more a few months ago but is still true now: Siena thinks that when you ask her to do something more quickly (like getting dressed or cleaning up her room), if she flails her limbs about fast she is doing her task “quick quick” even if the actual rate of task completion decreases. Sure she looks busy, but less is getting done. I try to tell her to focus, be more efficient, etc. Maybe I should tell her to work smarter, not faster or something.

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Friday night was pretty rough; Thalia was up from 1 AM for an hour screaming. I tried to console her by sitting with her but she just couldn’t get comfortable and kept on crying. With the weekend ahead of me, I said enough is enough and I just put her back in bed and let her scream it out. 45 minutes later she was asleep. Then half an hour later Siena got me up needing to use the bathroom and then some company in order to get settled back down again.

Going into Saturday night, Thalia had not napped from 4:30 on, so by 7:30 she was exhausted. Sure three hours doesn’t sound like much, but remember she was sick still. With Siena needing to get her evening routine finished up and me being tired from the day itself and worried about another night of aborted sleep, I figuratively threw up my hands and put Thalia down at 7:40 and decided to let her scream it out again. Interestingly, when I put her in her crib, she started by just looking around and touching the little embroidered animals on her crib bumper. She actually calmed down a little to be in the crib compared to being in my arms. So I turned off the light and left, at which point she started screaming.

Fortunately and amazingly, that lasted only about 10 minutes, during which time I was reading to Siena. Siena went to bed by 8 PM, and before I knew it, I had both girls asleep and it was only a quarter after 8. Wait, what? That never happens.

Sunday morning, Siena got up surprisingly late (around 6:30). And then to add miracle to mystery, Thalia slept past 7 AM; when I looked in on her at 7:30 she was still (or again) asleep! Siena and I didn’t go in until 8 o’clock to get her out of bed. This was Thalia’s first (perhaps only ever) 12+ hour night of sleep. Incredible!

I repeated the process Sunday night, though I didn’t put her down until after 8 o’clock since she had napped later in the day. And this time, she only screamed for about two minutes before getting quiet and eventually falling asleep. And then both Monday and Tuesday nights it worked again.

I think I heard the clarion call of angels at some point during the evening.

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I tend to let the dishes and the messes pile up all day and then clean them all up in one big batch after the girls go to bed. I like to think I’m relying on my operations research background and employing an optimal policy of batching tasks together in order to reduce the “setup cost” of starting and stopping clean-up activities (washing hands, etc.).This is also the Alice’s Restaurant philosophy that rather than having two little piles of garbage it’s better to have one large one.

I suspect instead I’m just taking the easier approach of not trying to keep clean while Thalia is screaming or Siena is asking for help or wanting to read a book.

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More to come…

We competed in the MIT $50K business plan competition (it’s up to $100K now) and emerged a semi-finalist with some visibility in the venture capital community. We secured an initial round of financing, and in 2000 we incorporated our company on the date of Mama’s and my first anniversary. (This makes it easy for me to remember either our anniversary date or the date the company officially started, but not both at the same time.)

Almost ten years and many employees, customers, partners, friends, and stories later, Optiant today was acquired by Logility, Inc., a leading supplier of collaborative solutions to optimize the supply chain. The press release is available here.

Siena rarely asks me how my day was or what I do, and only today I informed her that I work at a computer all day after she quoted a Sesame Street video about fathers where one of them works at a computer. But last Friday when we were closing the deal, she did ask me at dinner, “What did you do today, daddy?” And I said, “Well, Siena, I sold my company.”

She, of course at her age, has no inkling of what that means. It will be a decade before she understands what being an entrepreneur is. She’ll internalize the concepts of risk, reward, and their trade-off years before she can communicate coherently about them.

Looking back, I never took the time to write about Mama’s graduation from vet school, though I mentioned it here. Mama made a similar calculation of risk and reward back in 2001, deciding to quit her own secure (and often relaxed) employment at Wellesley to go back to school, taking night classes to catch up on math and science undergrad courses and then going to Tufts University vet school (one of the most difficult programs to get into, by the way–go Mama!). And then we decided to start a family while she was in her third year there. Talk about risk!

And while it’s not clear if we’ll have the risk tolerance any time soon again to start something by diving into the deep end like that again, perhaps someday Siena and Thalia will understand, and if we are lucky learn something, from the crazy things their parents did before they were born. (Well, they aren’t really that crazy in the grand scheme of things.)

Most of the Optiant employees, including myself, are continuing on at Logility. For now, it will be business as usual for us as we figure out the best way to merge the great things we built into the great solutions they have. After that, who knows?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28FOB-medium-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print

Only partially related, I’m reminded of a story from Uncle Marcus. After his daughter was a few years old, for some reason he was using a film camera to take pictures of her (using up an unfinished roll from an old camera, I suspect). After a few pictures, she was really confused why she couldn’t review the pictures on the camera immediately.

If Siena is up at some point during the night 2 out of every 3 nights, and that’s about how she’s going presently, let’s say that there’s an 2/3 chance she’ll wake us up any given night. Thalia’s been doing a little better, and is up only one third of nights.

Assuming that if they don’t wake up during the night that means we get a good (enough) night’s sleep, then the probability that we get a good night’s sleep is the probability neither of them wakes up, which is (1-2/3) * (1-1/3) = 22.22% which is just over 1/5. So basically on average we get one full night of sleep every five days.

Oh wait, I forgot to throw in the nights that Nalia gets up at 4 or 5 to go out. That’s been happening every few days, let’s call it 40% of nights. That brings our “everyone sleeps through the night” probability to (1-2/3)*(1-1/3)*(1-.4) = 13.33% or right around 1/7. We are getting a full night of sleep once a week. Never mind that Tenzing and Penny are always ready and roaring (mewing) at 6.

Hence Nonna’s first thing she said to me when she saw me yesterday while visiting for her birthday: “You look exhausted.”

Thalia being up we can understand. She’s getting teeth, she’s still only 7 months. Nalia is annoying but understandable: She’s sick. Siena’s nighttime restlessness is what we need to get stopped. Right now she’s just about the worst offender, too. If we can get her down to 1/3 and I can force myself to walk Nalia every night around 11 or 12 and get her down to 20%, then we can get ourselves up to 2.5 full nights a week (well, 5 every 14 days).

Hey it’s not great, but it’s a start.

P.S. Of course my numbers might be slightly exaggerated since both girls were up around 4 AM this morning, and I’ve been up since then.

But in case you are interested in seeing a (decidedly unorganized but mostly chronological) gallery of all of our renovation photos, the full gallery link is here: http://ruark.smugmug.com/Home/Renovation-2009. As of today the gallery doesn’t contain the most up to date images, as the workers have been installing the screen doors on the porch, so it’s starting to look like a real room now. It’s beautiful too; we can’t wait to spend time out there this spring!

Nothing much to report on the kids today (so far). A snow storm is moving in this afternoon, so we’ll probably be picking them up early from school today.

Here were the fortunes:

• Thalia: “A chance meeting with someone from the past is in store.”
• Siena: “There is no secret to success except hard work.”
• Daddy: “The expert at anything was once a beginner.”
• Mama: “To lower your stress level, get a cat.”

To which we wondered, Thalia doesn’t have that much of a past, nor that many chances to run into people. And also, sure the stress levels are high, but do we really need another cat?

Siena astutely remarked, “Thalia is too young to eat her cookie [anyone could easily see where those little brain-wheels are headed], so I get to eat hers.”

Afterwards, I expected a better, and more reliable, fortune, would be, “You will soon experience a brief surge of hyperactivity.”

Amazingly, I notice now that I check, the announcement email Janette (or rather, “Janette,” because who knows if she was the one who actually hit Send) sent us was a mere hour and 45 minutes after time of birth! The original email sent to family appears to have been only 26 minutes after birth. Way to get back online and back to business, Janette!

Congratulations to you both on another girl. We hope Emma is excited to be a big sister now, and that everyone is healthy and doing well!

I’ve told several people that I’m getting a very warped sense of time, or at least how my days are filled by the time available. In something of an inversion of Parkinson’s Law, in the end there has been just enough time in the day to do what needs doing, at least at a very macro level.

Before Siena was born, we understood that our lives would become radically different, but naturally we couldn’t comprehend the manner or structure of the change. After a year, I would look back and think that given how much time taking care of Siena consumed, we must have had so much free time in our lives. But it had never felt that way. We weren’t exactly sitting around the house wondering what to do with all this extra time.

Then, with Thalia on the way, I wondered, how do people have two kids. We can barely manage one, and with both parents working and not having any time to ourselves, where would we find time for another kid? I looked at a bunch of other parents with two (or more) kids, and marveled at how they did the impossible. Even the prospect of mundane activities like getting both kids food or ready for school or ready for bed seemed overwhelming. (And to be frank, the prospect of getting them both ready for bed at the same time, which we don’t yet do, seems a frightening step to do by myself, so I’m not exactly looking forward to it.) When one kid occupies you fully from the time you get home until they go to bed, how do you make time for another?

Those four days in the hospital after Thalia was born, when Siena was at home and we could hand Thalia off to the nurses at night, felt like the last opportunity to catch our breaths before jumping into the even deeper end of the pool this time.

Now, six months later, I look at how we are getting by with both, Siena and Thalia generally seem happy and are doing well, and I think back at when it was just us and Siena, before we had the new huge time sink with the round cheeks and big smile, and I think, wow, we must have had so much free time when it was just the three of us.

Perhaps if we get to the kids early enough we can get some LotR fascination going. It would have to be the books and not the movies, of course, cause I don’t want my car plastered with pictures of Orlando Bloom if I can help it.