My wife sent me this heart touching snippet from a story written by W. Livingston Larned. In this crazy complex world of deadlines, stress and worries, I have many times done exactly what I should not have done - Forgotten that my son is just 2 years old. It brought tears to my eyes and I hope to never always remember that they are just children which is why they keep on doing what they are supposed to do. We as adults need to just spend a few moments in understanding them better.

Listen, son; I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside.

There are things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor.

At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, "Goodbye, Daddy!" and I frowned, and said in reply, "Hold your shoulders back!"

Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came Up the road, I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive - and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father!

Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. "What is it you want?" I snapped.

You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs.

Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding - this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years.

And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed!

It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: "He is nothing buy a boy - a little boy!"

I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother's arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much.

W. Livingston Larned.

I was reading an article in ComputerWorld  which really caught my attention. Here is an excerpt that I found so true across various companies I have worked. This is part of an interview between Kathleen Melymuka and the Harwell Thrasher, author of the book "Boiling the IT Frog".

Why do most projects fail? In my experience, there are six primary reasons. First, you’re doing the wrong project — it’s not what the business really needs. Second, you’re missing prerequisites in the proposal. You start and then realize you have to beef up the infrastructure, for example, so you’re in trouble right from the beginning. Third, you’re going for home runs instead of base hits; for example, a global rollout of a major system instead of chipping away at it a little at a time. Fourth, the project’s duration is greater than the job tenure of the sponsoring executive. If the project isn’t completed before he or she leaves, you may be in deep trouble with the successor. Fifth, you gather requirements instead of negotiating them. If you go around asking all the stakeholders what they want and your project goal is the sum of all those things, you will undoubtedly have contradictions — for example, a simple system that must do everything. Sixth, there’s not enough contingency planning. You’ve got to anticipate things that can go wrong and take them into account in your plan.

Boiling the IT Frog

One of the common problems I have seen is to bulk upload data to a SQL Server database. If you have the flexibility to directly run your code in SQL, you have a ton of options. But let's say that you have to massage the data before you throw it in to the database, then you have to really know your SQL (well to do it in SQL).

Let's say you have to read data from an RSS feed, parse it and then load it into SQL. Let's assume further that this feed updates every 2 hours. It would be a trivial task to write a C# app that reads and parses the feed. One crude way to upload this data would be to do a single row insert for each data element. This would be terribly inefficient. The other option would be to use .Net framework's SqlBulkCopy class.

The basic template would be something like

private void WriteToDatabase()
{
    // get your connection string
    string connString = "";
    // connect to SQL
    using (SqlConnection connection = 
            new SqlConnection(connString))
    {
        // make sure to enable triggers
        // more on triggers in next post
        SqlBulkCopy bulkCopy = 
            new SqlBulkCopy
            (
            connection, 
            SqlBulkCopyOptions.TableLock | 
            SqlBulkCopyOptions.FireTriggers | 
            SqlBulkCopyOptions.UseInternalTransaction,
            null
            );

        // set the destination table name
        bulkCopy.DestinationTableName = this.tableName;
        connection.Open();

        // write the data in the "dataTable"
        bulkCopy.WriteToServer(dataTable);
        connection.Close();
    }
    // reset
    this.dataTable.Clear();
    this.recordCount = 0;
}

The above code snippet shows you the API usage. But before you actually do that, you need to follow a couple of steps to setup your data table.

First, let's look at a simple record structure (as reflected in C# class):

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;

/// <summary>
/// Summary description for MyRecord
/// </summary>
public class MyRecord
{
    public int TestInt;
    public string TestString;

	public MyRecord()
	{
	}

    public MyRecord(int myInt, string myString)
    {
        this.TestInt = myInt;
        this.TestString = myString;
    }
}

Now, let's start dissecting the class that we will use to upload the data:

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.Configuration;
using System.IO;

namespace SqlExamples.FileLoader
{
/// <summary>
/// Summary description for BulkUploadToSql
/// </summary>
public class BulkUploadToSql
{
    private List<MyRecord> internalStore;

    protected string tableName;
    protected DataTable dataTable = new DataTable();
    protected int recordCount;
    protected int commitBatchSize;

Note that we have an internal List data structure as well as the DataTable. This is redundant and you can avoid using the internalStore if your application does not need to massage the data before it's sent to SQL.

I then define 2 private constructors. The reason is that we want to use the factory pattern to return our object to the caller.

    private BulkUploadToSql(
        string tableName, 
        int commitBatchSize)
    {
        internalStore = new List<MyRecord>();

        this.tableName = tableName;
        this.dataTable = new DataTable(tableName);
        this.recordCount = 0;
        this.commitBatchSize = commitBatchSize;

        // add columns to this data table
        InitializeStructures();
    }

    private BulkUploadToSql() : 
        this("MyTableName", 1000) {}

Note that we set the commit batch size. This is a very important factor that needs to be fine tuned for your database. What this defines is the number of records that we would send in one shot to the database.

The next step is to Initialize the data table with columns that reflect the actual table structure.

private void InitializeStructures()
{
    this.dataTable.Columns.Add("TI", typeof(Int32));
    this.dataTable.Columns.Add("TS", typeof(string));
}

I then provided a factory method to load data into my internal structure from a data source. In the example code below, I use a Stream, but this can be any data source from where you wish to populate your data.

public static BulkUploadToSql Load(Stream dataSource)
{
    // create a new object to return
    BulkUploadToSql o = new BulkUploadToSql();
    
    // replace the code below
    // with your custom logic 
    for (int cnt = 0; cnt < 10000; cnt++)
    {
        MyRecord rec = 
            new MyRecord
            (
            cnt, 
            string.Format("string{0}", cnt)
            );
        o.internalStore.Add(rec);
    }

    return o;
}

This would make sure that our class is properly initialized and loaded with data. Once the caller has a valid object, they can now "Flush" the data as shown below:

public void Flush()
{
    // transfer data to the datatable
    foreach (MyRecord rec in this.internalStore)
    {
        this.PopulateDataTable(rec);
        if (this.recordCount >= this.commitBatchSize)
            this.WriteToDatabase();
    }
    // write remaining records to the DB
    if (this.recordCount > 0)
        this.WriteToDatabase();
}

private void PopulateDataTable(MyRecord record)
{
    DataRow row;
    // populate the values
    // using your custom logic
    row = this.dataTable.NewRow();

    row[0] = record.TestInt;
    row[1] = record.TestString;

    // add it to the base for final addition to the DB
    this.dataTable.Rows.Add(row);
    this.recordCount++;
}

In the example above, the call to Flush() actually massages the data (and at the same time loads it into the actual data table). As I mentioned before, you can actually skip this step if your application does not require massaging.

As a example of an app that uses this class:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using SqlExamples.FileLoader;
using System.IO;

namespace DemoApp
{
class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        using (Stream s = 
            new StreamReader(@"C:\TestData.txt"))
        {
            BulkUploadToSql myData = 
                BulkUploadToSql.Load(s);
            myData.Flush();
        }
    }
}
}

As always, this is JUST demo code to explain a concept. This is NOT production quality code and please make sure to follow the coding guidelines in your team.

Happy coding....

One of the most tiresome (but important) things when developing web services is handling un-handled exceptions. A good design principle forces you to catch and cast relevant exceptions raised by your web methods into more meaningful SOAP exceptions. But exceptions will occur.

It is quite tedious to wrap each web method in a try/catch loop. This dictates a need for a common framework to handle unhandled web services exceptions. In this blog post, I will guide you through a step by step process for building one.

Summary:

1. Extend SoapExtension class and override the ProcessMessage() method.
2. In ProcessMessage(), add special handler code for message stage of SoapMessageStage.AfterSerialize.
3. Modify the web service's web.config file and add a <soapExtensionTypes> node to <webServices> section.

Details:

Ok, now let's dig deeper into the code.

Step 1:

The first step in the whole process is to extend the SoapExtension class override the ProcessMessage() method.

using System.IO;
using System.Web.Services;
using System.Web.Services.Protocols;
using System.Xml;
using System;

public class TelspaceSoapExtension : SoapExtension
{
    private Stream originalStream;
    private Stream updatedStream;

    public override object GetInitializer(Type serviceType)
    {
        return null;
    }

    public override object GetInitializer
    (LogicalMethodInfo methodInfo, SoapExtensionAttribute attribute)
    {
        return null;
    }

    public override void Initialize(object initializer)
    {
    }

    public override Stream ChainStream(Stream stream)
    {
        originalStream = stream;
        updatedStream = new MemoryStream();
        return updatedStream;
    }

    private void Transfer(Stream inStream, Stream outStream)
    {
        StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(inStream);
        StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(outStream);
        sw.Write(sr.ReadToEnd());
        sw.Flush();
    }

    public override void ProcessMessage(SoapMessage soapMessage)
    {
        switch (soapMessage.Stage)
        {
            case SoapMessageStage.BeforeDeserialize:
                Transfer(originalStream, updatedStream);
                updatedStream.Position = 0;
                break;

            case SoapMessageStage.AfterSerialize:
                if ((soapMessage.Exception != null))
                {
                    ExceptionProcessor processor = new ExceptionProcessor();

                    string details;

                    // handle our exception, and get the SOAP <detail> string
                    details = processor.HandleWebServiceException(soapMessage);

                    // read the entire SOAP message stream into a string
                    updatedStream.Position = 0;
                    TextReader tr = new StreamReader(updatedStream);

                    // insert our exception details into the string
                    string s = tr.ReadToEnd();
                    s = s.Replace("<detail />", details);

                    // overwrite the stream with our modified string
                    updatedStream = new MemoryStream();
                    TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(updatedStream);
                    tw.Write(s);
                    tw.Flush();
                }

                updatedStream.Position = 0;
                Transfer(updatedStream, originalStream);
                break;
        }
    }

}

Step 2:

The next step is to handle the exception and get out meaningful details from the exception. For this purpose, let's dig deeper into the ExceptionProcessor class. This class has one public method: HandleWebServiceException(System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapMessage sm). This method is called from our ProcessMessage()case SoapMessageStage.AfterSerialize.

Here is the code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using System.Web.Services.Protocols;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Reflection;
using SASMTPLib;
using System.IO;

class ExceptionProcessor
{
    private string currentExceptionDetails;
    private string currentExceptionTypeName;

    private const string RootExceptionName = "System.Web.HttpUnhandledException";
    private const string RootWsExceptionName = "System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException";

    public string HandleWebServiceException(System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapMessage sm)
    {
        HandleException(sm.Exception);
        XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
        XmlNode detailNode = doc.CreateNode(XmlNodeType.Element, SoapException.DetailElementName.Name, SoapException.DetailElementName.Namespace);
        XmlNode typeNode = doc.CreateNode(XmlNodeType.Element, "ExceptionType", SoapException.DetailElementName.Namespace);
        typeNode.InnerText = currentExceptionTypeName;
        detailNode.AppendChild(typeNode);

        XmlNode messageNode = doc.CreateNode(XmlNodeType.Element, "ExceptionMessage", SoapException.DetailElementName.Namespace);
        messageNode.InnerText = sm.Exception.Message;
        detailNode.AppendChild(messageNode);

        XmlNode infoNode = doc.CreateNode(XmlNodeType.Element, "ExceptionInfo", SoapException.DetailElementName.Namespace);
        infoNode.InnerText = currentExceptionDetails;
        detailNode.AppendChild(infoNode);
        return detailNode.OuterXml.ToString();
    }

    private void HandleException(Exception ex)
    {
        try
        {
            currentExceptionDetails = NormalizeException(ex);
            currentExceptionTypeName = ex.GetType().FullName;

            // ignore root exceptions
            if (((currentExceptionTypeName == RootExceptionName) || (currentExceptionTypeName == RootWsExceptionName)))
            {
                if (ex.InnerException != null)
                {
                    currentExceptionTypeName = ex.InnerException.GetType().FullName;
                }
            }
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            currentExceptionDetails = string.Format("Error \'{0}\' while generating exception string", e.Message );
        }

        ExceptionToEmail();
    }

    private string NormalizeException(Exception ex)
    {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

        if (ex.InnerException != null)
        {
            if (((ex.GetType().ToString() == RootExceptionName) || (ex.GetType().ToString() == RootWsExceptionName)))
            {
                return NormalizeException(ex.InnerException);
            }
            else
            {
                sb.Append(NormalizeException(ex.InnerException));
                sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);
                sb.Append("(Outer Exception)");
                sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);
            }
        }

        // get exception-specific information
        sb.Append("Exception Type:\t\t");
        try
        {
            sb.Append(ex.GetType().FullName);
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            sb.Append(e.Message);
        }
        sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);

        sb.Append("Exception Message:\t\t");
        try
        {
            sb.Append(ex.Message);
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            sb.Append(e.Message);
        }
        sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);

        sb.Append("Exception Target Method:\t");
        try
        {
            sb.Append(ex.TargetSite.Name);
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            sb.Append(e.Message);
        }
        sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);

        sb.Append("Stack Trace:\t\t");
        sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);
        try
        {
            sb.Append(ex.StackTrace);
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            sb.Append(e.Message);
        }
        sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);

        return sb.ToString();
    }

    private void ExceptionToEmail()
    {
        // Send e-mail code
    }

}

Step 3:

The final step is to modify web.config of the web services to include the following section (under <system.web> node)

<webServices>
  <soapExtensionTypes>
    <add type="TelspaceSoapExtension, ExceptionHandler" priority="1" group="High"/>
  </soapExtensionTypes>
</webServices>

One of the biggest pain points that I have seen for Windows Live Spaces users is the in-ability to change a blog post date (once posted).

Well, for those of you (including me) who have been bitten by this problem more than once, cry no more!!! Windows Live Writer team recently launched their flag ship product (read about it here) that has a "mechanism" to change the blog post date. Here it goes... (don't get scared by the number of steps I have listed below. I have broken the process down in very minute steps).

1. Install Windows Live Writer from here and set it up for Windows Live Spaces and make it point to your space (e.g. Nikhil's space)
2. Click on "Open" (from either File->Open Post... OR the Open button on the tool bar.
3. Select your Space from the list on the left side. There will be a brief wait while the Writer is getting blog posts from your space. You will then be shown your latest 5 blog entries. Let's say you want to edit post #2 which you had posted a week back.
4. Double click on the post. The post opens in edit mode in a new window. There are 2 ways to reach to the "Change date" section - either press "F2" or navigate to the bottom of the page and click onthe "Properties" line.
5. You will see a Date/Time: edit field. Check the checkbox next to the date and update the date/time to what ever you desire. Make sure you do not specify a date greater than NOW.
6. Click on "Publish" at the top on the tool bar.

YOU ARE DONE. It's that's simple. Enjoy!!!

This post has been long overdue on my part. I have been planning to write this up for now over a year...

Windows Live Spaces search feature is a very powerful tool that allows you to to search Spaces contents in a very precise way. Let me first introduce some basic concepts:

Scoping (a.ka. Drill down): Spaces search results can be scoped to specific object types. Currently, 4 types of scoping is permitted: "All", "Spaces", "People" and "Blog entries". The following image shows the various options.

When you first do a keyword search (more on this below), we try to give you a "preview" into all areas of Spaces that would have a match for your given search term. From here you can narrow down (aka drill down) into one specific area that interests you. For example, if you are just looking for personal spaces home page (e.g. nikhil.spaces.live.com), narrowing down to Spaces is what you would do. On the same idea, if you are looking for profiles (e.g. http://nikhil.spaces.live.com/personalspace.aspx?_c01_memberprofiletile=showdefault&_c=memberprofiletile), you would select "People" and if your interest lies in blog entries (e.g. http://nikhil.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A6E2B32DB60BF014!925.entry), you would use "Blog entries" scope.

There are 2 ways to drill down to your specific scope (or result type) - By using the drop down box (as shown in the above image) or by clicking the name in the section display (see image below).

Search Types: Now that we have some understanding of what scoping is and how it works, let's change our focus on different types of searches that Spaces supports. The first type is very obvious - Keyword search. This is the search that happens when you issue a search query from the Header (sorry for the squished up image).

Keyword search is what you would generally do on MSN Search (or Google). When you do a keyword search, the page text crawled is searched. Also, for a keyword search, you can scope to all different types of searches.

The second type of search you can do is "Interests" or "Tag" search. This is a very specific search that you can initiate from various UI elements - From the "Spaces interests" page, or from the interests section of a personal profile page or from "Advanced People Search" (more on this one below). When you do an "Interests" search, we (Spaces) issues a special "META" search for people's profiles that have been "tagged" with those interests. As we are searching for interests, we only show you "Profile" scoped results.

The third type of search is the most advanced, complicated and well, interesting. We call it Advanced People Search or APS for short. You can do an APS from the Spaces home page.

This is again a people profile search so you would get only "People" results and you cannot change the scope. This is a specialized search that searches for people's profiles for very specific items. You can search for Display Name, First Name, Last Name, Gender, Age range, Location, Occupation and Interests or any combination there of. This allows you to search for, lets say, Females, in the age range of 25-29, living in Seattle, who are software engineers and are interested in having fun :-). This is a very powerful search mechanism that let's you drill down on very specific attributes for people you are looking for.

Other UI elements:

• Saved session search: Once you have issued a search, it will be saved for your session and you can always visit it back by clicking on the "Search" tab on the left navigation panel on the Spaces home page.

• Contact control: Spaces search is very different than other search engines as we do not show you just the search results. For each search result, we show you a "Contact control" which allows you to see that person's photo (if available) and a bunch of other options like viewing their space, profile, contact card, friends list, etc. etc.

• "Safe" search: We take protecting our minors very seriously. Only "gray area" words are allowed if you are signed in and are of an adult age as defined by your market (for example 18 years in en-US).
• Search RSS feed: Spaces search results are also available as RSS feeds (if you are so inclined). Navigate down to the bottom of the page and you will see a cool looking RSS icon which will let you subscribe to that search result (properly scoped and typed) as an RSS feed. We limit the RSS feed items to the top 10 items.

• "Collapsible" sections: The search results for each scope are contained within a section which can be collapsed/expanded by either clicking the +/- symbol on the left or on the blue section header.

• Ads: Of course, we have to make money too :-)

What sucks: Aha... The section that every developer hates to talk about. But I will be brave and hopefully you will also be understanding enough as we work through the issues and improve the experience. My 2 biggest sore points are result count and  paging controls. We are working on both these issues and hopefully will have a better story on them.

• Result count: Although we show that for a given query we have 137838 results (see image above), we do not show any results over page 16 (or 17). Basically, we cap out at 250 results (we are not responsible for this - more on this in another post). It SUCKS.
• Paging: This is a direct result of the above problem. The paging model allows you to navigate to the "last" page of search results, but since we cap the result as 250, this paging model does not make sense.

Hopefully, these notes would help you understand how spaces search cab be used by you in a more meaningful way that relates more to what you are looking for. After all, Windows Live Spaces is your personal reflection to the world.

 An excellent collection of radio stations...

Quote

List of Hindi & Punjabi radio stations online

I thought I would share some a few of the resources I use to listen to music and relax.  Here is the list of online Hindi & Punjabi radio stations that I listen to frequently. Copy the URL in your media player and enjoy !!

RadioTarana-NewZealand ==> mms://l1.r2.co.nz/tarana-1

106.2 HUMFM - UAE ==> http://www.humfm.com/humfm.asx 

RadioOfIndia - Bollywood ==> http://www.radioofindia.com/asf/bollywood.asx

RadioOfIndia - Bhajans ==> http://www.radioofindia.com/asf/bhajans.asx

RadioOfIndia - Classical ==> http://66.238.65.109/classical

DesiSoundz - India ==> http://desisoundz.com:8000

Sabras radio - UK ==> http://ct1.fast-serv.com:8744 

Haagstad Radio - Holand ==> mms://81.205.146.32:21/haagstadradio 

RadioTeenTaal - Paris ==> http://www.radioteentaal.com/masala128.wax 

ApnaRadio - USA ==> http://www.apnaradio.com/live/media24/ApnaRadio.asx

BombayBeats FM ==> http://www.1.fm/player/energybbfm32k.asx

Punjabi Radio - UK ==> http://azul.streamguys.com/panjabradio?MSWMExt=.asf

Amrit Bani - UK ==> http://62.25.97.192/amritbani?MSWMExt=.asf

Yarr Radio - UK ==> mms://193.218.160.20/yaarradio

Sunrise FM - UK ==> http://62.25.96.7/sunrise

Radio XL - UK ==> http://www.vtuner.com/vTunerweb/mms/m3u13219.m3u

Asian Gold Radio - UK ==> http://62.25.96.7/asiangold

Asian Sound Radio - UK ==> http://www.vtuner.com/vtunerweb/mms/mms15278.asx

Sanskar Radio - UK ==> http://www.vtuner.com/vTunerweb/mms/m3u18290.m3u

Trishul 90.5 FM ==> http://www.vtuner.com/vtunerweb/mms/mms14734.asx

Radio Apni Awaz ==> mms://67.15.80.29/radioapniawaz

Radio India - Canada ==> mms://live.radioindiabroadcasting.com/liveradio

City 101.6 FM - Dubai ==> http://asx.abacast.com/arabian_radio-city-24.asx

DDLive Video - India ==> http://164.100.51.209/ddlive?MSWMExt=.asf 

AajKal - Asian Network ==>

http://stream.servstream.com/ViewWeb/BBCRadio_music/Event/BBCAsianNetwork_hi.asx

BBC News ==> http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/meta/tx/nb/live_news_au_nb.asx

 

More info

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=seattledayplans07&date=20060505&query=Seattle+%2B%22one+day%22

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=travelreaders14&date=20060512&query=Seattle+%2B%22one+day%22

Your best bet for not doubling cost is probably a nanny -- I don't think there's cheaper daycare between Woodinville and work that is a quality match. (Personally, I'm sticking with the Learning Garden when my second is ready to start daycare, because my older daughter does really well with the group situation and a nanny *plus* preschool would be even more expensive.)

I would suggest checking out the Overlake Kindercare. It’s on 152^nd just down the street from Office Depot. My daughter has been there since she was five months old. We’ve been very pleased with their care. The director, Vicky, is well organized, makes an effort to know all the kids and families, and very open to listening to parents’ concerns. They also offer a 10% discount to Microsoft families and the tuition is very reasonable. Our daughter is now in the Toddler room and with the discount we pay just over $800 a month.

You should be able to hire a nanny for less than that, especially if you share full or part time with another family. If you have the room for one, au pairs are quite inexpensive, since their room and board is part of their pay. To make sure that your son has socialization time, look into co-op pre-schools, or part-time pre-school. Your nanny can drive him there and pick him up.

Use a nanny to care for both kids if they are close in age

I will be moving to Issaquah after school ends this year and will be selecting an AuPair to care for the children. With the older 2 in Kindergarten and 1^st Grade, she will supply after school care for them. The 2 year old will attend a Coop preschool which the AuPair will take her to and will also count towards the required educational credits the AuPair needs. The contract is 1 year and you select your AuPair. The initial fee is $6000 and then you pay $140 a week; I believe its $170 a week for infant care qualifications. They can only work 45 hours a week, so I will probably have a flex schedule where I work at home one day a week. Each person needs to make the choice when it comes to safety and how comfortable they are with in home care. Honestly, I’m not sure I would have done this with an infant…for some reason I felt “safe” having my babies in a daycare setting before they could talk. However, both my older children were very calm and quiet and therefore received hardly any attention when they were babies in daycare.

It is my hope that the AuPair will be able to do many of the same things I was able to do when I was a stay at home mom. This will benefit the children, as well as the AuPair since part of her reasons to be here is to experience the culture. The more I read about the AuPair programs the more I think it is a very good arrangement. I have not selected an agency yet, but if you are interested I can forward you some of the contacts I have.

Look at the in-home day cares. They are cheaper around $800 - $900 per month for a child. There are lots of them near main campus.

My daughter currently goes to Lake Washington Technical Colleges child care center. I can’t say enough about them. I have never visited Bright Horizons, but I know that every child I have seen at my daughters daycare is 99.9% always happy to be there. They are located in Kirkland and for my 2 year old, I only pay $700 a month. As she gets older the cost goes down. I supply lunch and extra clothes and they do lots of art projects and sensory, singing, dancing, playing and go outside every day as long as it isn’t absolutely pouring. They are usually really full so you may have to go onto a waiting list, but I highly recommend them for the care that they provide as well as the cost.

Toni Terry is the Director and can be reached at 425.739.8117.

Get a good nanny. You may be able to find one for around $2500 per month. We faced the same situation when we had our second child. We now have four kids, and we are still with a Nanny, as there’s no way I could afford four kids at the Learning Garden. : )

The benefits of having the Nanny is not having to drive and pick up the kids, less colds, more consistent chilld care, they can be on their own schedules. We’re happy with the flexibility a Nanny offers, especially as the kids get older and they need to be dropped off and picked up at schools, doctors appointments, etc.

You're closing in on full time nanny territory at $3,000 a month. We have a full-time nanny for our one child: monthly cost about 3,400 plus another 33% for FICA and taxes. We have her for almost 50 hours a week, so if you can limit the time to 40 hours a week, you can bring the cost to less than 3,000 a month. While the right thing to do is pay FICA etc, a lot of folks do not. If neither your husband nor you is planning to run for public office, you can probably fly under the radar screen. Plus, some nannies would rather have the extra $$ than have you pay their FICA.

The benefits of having someone arrive at your house each morning and save you the insanity of getting everyone out the door and having a second pair of hands for housework and laundry cannot be underestimated. Most importantly, the 1:1 attention for your children will be wonderful.

Although we used an agency to find our nanny, consider posting an ad for the position on Craig's List and conduct a background check yourself to save the agency fee, which can be a few thousand dollars.

Wow, have you considered a nanny? We had only one child and we did this when nannies weren’t quite so expensive. I still think that you might be able to save money that route, even at today’s prices. We loved every aspect of it. We hired a person who had a son the same age as ours and who brought him along. She took the kids somewhere every day and as part of her compensation we gave her memberships to the Zoo, the Aquarium, the Science Center, etc. She also had a play group of which she was a member and took the kids to that to interact with kids other than each other. The situation worked out fantastic for us, our son was loved, got lots of attention and had a “best buddy” everywhere he went. We really missed them when she moved and he moved into preschool.

There are lots of tips on finding a good nanny on the sharepoint, if you’d like to take a look. http://stsweb/MSParents/default.aspx Check under Free discussion and Infant Care discussion.

Small Dimensions, Bellevue (not Redmond)…..by Overlake Hospital. 425.453.1216

Monthly care is reasonable $$......care givers are awesome!

They are booked so I recommend getting on a waiting list. We love the place!

Is he getting enough protein? Out daughter was consistently underweight until about a year, and we think it was because we had read that pieces of meat, even small ones, were a choking hazard for small children so we weren’t feeding her any meat. When we started feeding her meat paste (put the meat through a baby-food grinder) she gained weight rapidly.

If you’re vegetarian, then obviously you’d need to use beans/peas/lentils and similar high-protein vegetable foods – and to look into issues about the required balance of different amino acids, since the balance humans need and the balance available from most vegetable protein sources are not an ideal match. Or if your diet includes dairy products and/or eggs, they’re both great protein sources.

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I just want to share my experience. My pediatrician was concerned about my daughter’s weight gain too. She started out in the 90% for weight and went to 75 to 50 to 25 from 4 – 9 months. She was concerned because her weight seemed to go down when she started solids. Wanted me to feed her more, give her more milk. After I stressed out about it for awhile, my husband convinced me not to be too concerned about it because she was eating well and didn’t seem overly thin and was generally healthy and developing well. We chalked some of it up to the charts they used to compare height, weight, and head circumference. They were created off of kids in the 1950’s in the US (mostly Caucasian). So it doesn’t take into account different ethnicities and a lot of other factors. My husband was a really skinny kid, me not so much. So we chalked it up to heredity and didn’t worry about it too much.

She’ll be 3 years old in June. And she’s skinny as a stick. (She’s got a tall and thin body type) We joke that we can see her ribs. But she eats very well and often. She just has a super high metabolism. And our pediatrician is not concerned about her weight anymore.

And she did sleep 8 hours through the night by the time she was 6 months old, and napped well during the day. So I don’t think the sleep thing has anything to do with her metabolism rate. It was still high.

I hope that encourages you and puts your mind to rest a little bit.

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Our daughter had the same problem – she was consistently underweight (under the 3rd percentile). We went through a series of tests as well and nothing came up. We were suggested a high fat and high calorie. Things like Ritz bits, a lot of butter in food, heavy cream in her milk (this we did after she was a year old). In the end none of this really . We found that when we gave her a high fat diet – shehelped would just eat less of it. She used to love eating steamed vegetables but with a high fat diet she started eating less food and certainly a lot less of healthy foods. We stopped trying after a while.

Now she is 2½ years old – . She has always slept less than thehealthy, active and still skinny average kid her age and has always been more active as well. Also she does eat well – she finishes her meals and snacks at day care and we hear fairly regularly from her teacher that she has an excellent appetite. She just doesn’t seem to put on weight – which will probably be a boon when she grows older!

I know it can be pretty frustrating and stressful – we went through a lot of it when we were trying really hard to fatten her up. So if your son is eating healthy meals, is happy and active I wouldn’t worry too much.

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I talked with a couple of the mom’s in my mom’s group and they suggested looking at the Super Baby Food book for ideas. It has a lot of recipes in their that add additional “good” food to what your son will eat. This way you won’t get as much “filler” food that the per-made food can contain.

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I would feed him more (natural food) protein but check with your doctor first, of course. Baby Cereal doesn’t really have a lot of nutritional/caloric substance (check the label).

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Scheduling feedings is key. Good feeding patterns beget good sleeping patterns. Sleeping promotes growth. So you are on the right track in guessing the sleep is probably contributing to his lack of weight gain, not to mention the consistent activity.

It is important to schedule his feedings so he does get longer sleep times. Why do I know this? I gave birth to twins who are now 15 months. We scheduled these 2 every 2 ½ hours feeding since birth and they slept through the night and had scheduled naps at 2.5 months. Until they were about 4 months they had a bottle, were up for 1 ½ hours, then went to sleep for 1 hour.

I read BabyWise which told me about the scheduled feedings and the sleeping patterns that develop. I couldn’t believe it happened like clockwork. Consider getting your baby on a schedule right away and read BabyWise.

At about 9 months your baby should have 2 naps a day. Ours was 1 at 10:30am and another at 2-3pm for 1 to 2 hours.

I know it works because I had 2 babies on the exact same schedule that changed as they got older but they always were consistently sleeping at the same time.

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I went through this with my son. Visits to the pediatrician and Children’s all determined nothing wrong, just need to bulk him up. At age 6 he’s still only in the 3rd percentile for weight and he didn’t get up there until he was 3.

At 9 months old they had me giving him some heavy calorie food to add the weight. For example, they had me put butter on his vegetables, add carnation instant breakfast drink to his whole milk (I think “pediasure” and “ensure” have a lot of the same content & calories), always put cereal into his formula, and feed him as often as possible, which it sounds like you are already doing. They also had me try to pack on as many calories right before bed as possible. The more calories I managed to get into him, the longer he slept. The lack of calories may be contributing to the lack of sleep.

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We had this exact situation with my son (who is now 2.5 years). He’s just at the right weight – maybe slightly under weight. And, sorry to say – he still doesn’t sleep through the night. He’s up at least once. We just give him a sippy cup of water and that’s enough to tide him over till the morning. What we did was introduce yo baby yogurt (twice a day) – per our dr. recommendation. He loved the yogurt (still does). You can find yo baby yogurt in the organic section of some grocery stores. Others have it right with the regular yogurt. The yo baby yogurt is high in fat (plus gives them extra protein). Make sure you check with your doctor before starting him on yogurt though.

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Pureed avocado

Mashed potatoes with butter or olive oil

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Our daughter didn't seem to be following her curve at that age as well although now at age 2 her pediatrician has decided that's just how she is.

Here are some things we did after consulting with a dietician you might try:

- when you make formula, use 1.5 times the amount of powder in the usual amount of water

- mix flax seed oil into his solids (cereal, yogurt, whatever)

- avocado

He may sleep better if he has more calories in his system...?

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If your baby is “consistently underweight”, unless he has fallen off the percentile chart (unlikely), I don’t see what the problem is. Usually it’s a downward trend that raises flag. Mathematically, someone has to be lower on the percentile list, just as someone needs to fall near the top. There’s nothing inherently unhealthy or preferable about either position.

Here’s a link you might find interesting http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4236229.stm

“Growth tables used to chart a baby's development may be inaccurate, on-going research suggests.

The World Health Organization study found they may over-estimate how quickly babies should put on weight.

The latest WHO study, of 8,440 children from six countries, found that target weights for two and three-year-olds were 15% to 20% too high.

And the charts suggest healthy one-year-old weighs between 22.5lb (10.2kg) and 28.5lb (12.93kg), when in fact the true healthy weight is 21lb (9.53kg) to 26lb (11.79kg), they say.

The researchers say the current overfeeding of babies could explain in part why this generation of adults is the fattest ever.”

You didn’t provide detail, but I’d question the doctor’s bulk—up recommendations a bit further provided as you say, your son is consistently underweight. Maybe seek a second opinion.

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Don’t freak out about it. I was a stick figure basically until I got pregnant at age 29. Seriously, I was 5’7” and 90 pounds in high school (and again in graduate school, but that was stress!) – eating a well-rounded diet, lots of physical activity, just a stick figure. It’s in my genes (I know, I’m lucky). My mother and grandfather are built the same way (and he survived 2 kinds of cancer and lived to age 94 will all his own teeth, so there’s something to that being skinny thing). There’s actually research that shows folks who are way skinny live longer. Doctors are all targeting the mean. You know your kid – offer lots of different foods, and if he’s active, learning, enjoying – don’t sweat it. My best friend’s daughter has been at the 10% percentile since she was born, and she’s now 3 – with no ill effects. It will be fine!

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Hi Brian – While I can’t give too much help on the bulking up front, I highly recommend the following book on sleep. My wife swears by it and it has helped us out a lot. We’ve referred it to a couple of friends who also have had great success implementing some of the ideas.

Dr. Marc Weissbluth "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child” 

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Hi there Brian – I’m curious about this b/c I’ve seen a few postings recently about wanting to help babies to gain more weight. My daughter is probably classified as underweight as well – she’s usually in the 10th percentile in weight, but in 50-75% in height at her checkups (she’s 7.5 months). The pediatrician was initially (in the 1st three weeks of her life) concerned, but then relaxed when she saw her own “growth curve” establish. I understand that to be that my daughter is gaining weight steadily at her own rate, though not according to the official infant weight charts. I’m not concerned that she’s underweight, but all these recent questions make me wonder if I should be more concerned?

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My daughter is a pip squeak. Smallest percentile in all of her check ups since birth. She’s only just gained on that and is at 25% at her 9 month visit.

She’s healthy and eats like a line backer most of the time. She’s a happy kid, is hitting all of her milestones.

Why is your dr. saying that he should gain weight? I’m guessing that he may be referencing the percentile chart. Did your wife breastfeed your son? If so, breastfed babies are often smaller and the percentile chart that we all use for a standard is created with formula babies in mind. Our daughter was breastfed exclusively until 7 months then had fomula/pumped milk until 10 months. At 10 months she was at 100% formula.

My daughter is my first born and I’ve pretty much stopped worrying about her size and weight and comparing to other kids. We were considerably worried after she was born because she was so small, had jaundice and was losing weight. We take her to the Dr. for all regular check ups and immunizations so I believe in the medical establishment. But I also believe in believing in what your gut is telling you and second opinions.

I would question needing to add additional weight to your son’s frame unless it truly looked like he was malnourished or if there were obvious health or developmental concerns.

If and your wife are worried about his weight then ask for a second opinion to be sure.

I think that many Americans believe that babies need to be chubby and fat in order to be healthy when little ones like my daughter point to the opposite. My daughter is a svelte and at 15 months only weights 23 lbs or so. The only “chub” that she has is around her thighs.

With obesity on the rise it’s a tough call for the need to feed your son more unless it’s obvious that he wants more. We just go by the push the spoon away indication that our daughter is full. Some days she will want three cheerios, other days she’ll eat a garden burger pattie, 2 tangerines and 3 bowls of yoghurt in one sitting. (seriously!)

By the way, our ped told us that after 12 months you don’t need to give formula, start on milk products and not to worry about other supplements. Maybe once you add milk fats to his diet he’ll begin bulking up a little too. You can’t give him milk now but if he likes avocado that has a lot of fat (good fat) in it.

I think that it sounds like you and your wife are doing everything right. And if your son is thriving that’s all that matters!

You’ll likely be looking up to a 6’5 teen in no time!!

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Butter up the dishes! You might be in a vicious cycle. Tired kids don’t necessarily sleep well. So they wake up tired and are super active and don’t eat well and get more tired and don’t get rested well… You get my drift. Try to pace him a bit and start varying and introducing more solids. Try to catch him getting sleepy before he is overly tired and if you get him to sleep at that critical minute, then he may start napping longer. My daughter, now 2.5, still doesn’t go to sleep easily and gets more and more active if I miss that moment when she is mellow and ‘just ready’ to go to sleep.

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We have been feeding out 7 month old, 7 oz per feeding since he was 4 months old….although he eats every 3-4 hours. Have you tried bigger feedings spaced more apart? Yes, his lack of sleep could cause this as well. We had issues with weight gain for the first 2 months and he was awake a lot more than other babies.

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Could be from being very active. My daughter was like that. Didn’t sleep much, extremely alert and active, and was in the 5th percentile for weight at one year (down from the 80th percentile at birth).

She is a average sized teenager now and I can’t remember exactly when it resolved. I think her weight was normal by 2 or 3 yrs. (after she discovered macaroni & cheese)

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but haveI’m not a doctor had enough experience with all this stuff to at least think that there’s some sort of nutrient absorption problem going on; he may eat all day but if the nutrients aren’t being absorbed properly that can lead to all the symptoms you’re describing – including sleep problems. Keep looking for a doctor that can figure it out!! Best of luck – I totally sympathize – we found gluten intolerance runs in our family…but it took a really long time of active investigation.

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Our daughter was diagnosed with ‘failure to thrive’ and we have battled her lack of weight gain since she was born. She had several other health issues (the biggest of which was congenital heart defects) that contributed to her high metabolism but we were constantly battling the weight gain, non-the-less. Some tricks that we found (with the help of her nutritionists):

•           You can actually mix extra formula powder...we mixed her milk using breastmilk (I was pumping all the time) and added the extra formula powder to it. There is a ‘recipe’ to it though that ensures they aren’t getting so much protein that they can’t digest it appropriately, etc. I don’t remember the exact formula but a pediatric nutritionist could definitely give this to you.

•           It may be a little soon for Pediasure but we moved to pediasure when our daughter was about 11 months old. This is a meal replacement/supplement that actually provides all of the nutritional needs and is used to feed children that won’t eat by mouth at all (they have to be fed liquids only).

•           There’s another powder supplement...I think it’s called Additions and it’s basically a protein supplement. We used to buy it through Option Care (they’re a home health supply company).

•           Anyplace you can, add a little bit of melted butter or other high calorie topping for basic calories...to the rice cereal, mashed veggies, etc.. This isn’t ideal for other reasons but is a way to get more calories...

If you are still looking for suggestions, I would highly recommend using a pediatric nutritionist. We’ve used a nutritionist through Children’s hospital and they were great. They can also help determine if maybe your baby is just a small baby or if there’s some other reason for the high metabolism. I hope this helps.

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We had a similar issue with our son – we didn’t want him to just get fat…so we started adding “healthy” fat to his diet – for instance he loved whole wheat bread – so we started giving him that with olive oil – lots of calories but much healthier. We basically found as many ways as possible to add olive oil to his diet – and now he loves olive oil as much as butter – which is good! It is also good on pasta too.

Good luck – our son is now 5 and he is in the 50th %.

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sounds like you have quite the active little guy! My 19-month son was/is also on the slim side and for quite a while was in the 15-20th percent on weight but 80-90% on height. Here are a few thoughts .... First, eating every hour is pretty frequent for a 9-month old. Feedings should be at least 2-3 hours apart by that age, and he is physically able to sleep 8-9 hours w/o a feeding. Maybe he's eating less at each feeding because he's not all that hungry (since there's another feeding right around the corner). His short naps might also be contributing. At that age, babies should be getting 12-14 hours of total sleep per day, sometimes more. If he's really low on the weight charts, there are enriched formulas w/ more calories, but that should only be a short-term solution. I think they're by prescription only (we didn't use them). One idea to eliminate the nighttime feeding is to substitute water for the formula. They get really cranky about that and it takes a few nights, but eventually they realize it's not worth waking up for. I was nervous to cut the nighttime feeding because I didn't want to take those calories out of his day --- but he did just fine, settled himself down after 10 minutes or so (we generally don't go in until 10-15 minutes have passed when he wakes up at night), and generally ate more during the day to wake up from it.

Also, make sure you're using a nipple with a bigger opening; he could probably drink more than 4-5 ounces at a time by now; flow might be an issue. Am assuming he doesn't have any other health issues that prevent him from consuming greater volumes (reflux, etc.).

Good luck to you --- most importantly, if he has enough energy to be an active kid and is overall pretty healthy, don't worry about it too much.

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I am not sure if you should worry about this. What does your pediatrician say? He is too young now, but at 1 year, you can start giving him cheese slices. I liked this idea a lot, because as they grow they can use the low-fat versions. It is a good source of protein, calcium and will help him gain weight. Whole milk is also good (from 1 year).

My kid was in the 20-25 percentile. Now, he is between 50 – 75 percentile. I would attribute it to dairy.

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Have you been giving him any wheat based cereal during this time? It’s a long shot – but if you have – you might want to get him tested for gluten intolerance. That can cause low weight and height. The lack of sleep may be something to be concerned about – it may be a sign of some other sort of allergy or health condition. From what I’ve read babies and small children need at least 12 to 14 hours of sleep a day for good brain and physical development. Not trying to cause alarm – just the 4 hrs. per night part doesn’t sound good.

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Hi Brian, you might try Similac Neosure. We used this with out preemie twins to help them gain weight – it’s a formula w/ a higher calorie content. http://welcomeaddition.com/product9.aspx