On February 9th 2013, I quit my job at Google, where I had worked for nine years. On June 21 2013, my daughter Sadie was born, and my life began.
Like many new parents, welcoming a baby into the world was a spectacularly fascinatingly beautifully scary and life-affirming experience. Everything shifts into perspective. Then it shifts again. Then things fall out of focus when it’s 3am and you awake, not cognizant of ever falling asleep in the first place, on a cold hardwood floor lying next to a Moses basket with your hand numb from trying to hold a pacifier in the mouth of your little one.
As my wife and I navigated the complexity and simplicity of those first few months, we found ourselves seeking certain elements of structure. We started tracking everything. When did we put her to sleep? How long did she sleep for? Where did she sleep? Did she eat from the left or right breast, and for how long? When did we bottle feed and how did she sleep afterwards? We chased patterns and trends. We found one or two, but the tools we were using (iPhone and Android apps, Google docs, and notebooks) weren’t able to provide us with any kind of meaningful insight. In the meantime, we found ourselves barely treading water in the ocean of the baby product world. Recommendations came from everywhere and everyone. We sought something that would tie it all together, but towards the end of the year, as Sadie was graduating from her first three months of being a human, we had given up. Four months later, in the midst of a job search, I found Mimo.
I’ll disclaim the following comments by admitting that I’m the COO of Rest Devices, the makers of the Mimo. But I was a believer before I joined their ranks. Sadie has been one of Mimo’s biggest fans: she wears the latest and greatest Mimo sleepwear as we find new kimono threads, she’s in our training videos and marketing brochures, and, much to the proud pleasure of her grandparents, she’s appeared on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal.
As a former Google employee who lived in San Francisco, I’m obsessed with technology and how it can change us as humans and help us see things we’d not even imagined. Now, as a Mimo Dad, I’m living it in a completely different sphere: a sphere where groundbreaking technology meets data aggregation meets baby products. Here, I’m actually LEARNING things about how my daughter behaves and sleeps that I never thought possible. I’ve learned that she sleeps better in cooler room temperatures than in warm ones. I’ve learned that she often wakes up around 4:30am but falls back to sleep within 20 minutes if my wife and I don’t enter the nursery. I’m starting to see patterns and trends in time-to-sleep and wake times that I would have killed for not ten months ago. I’m someone who has learned to trust his instincts, and those instincts have helped my daughter become a righteously awesome human being (ahem), but I’ve never shirked the value of learning something new that gives me a deeper level of understanding into the world. And in a nutshell, that’s what Mimo is.
And the best part? It’s getting better every day. An expanded timeline view. A sleep training app. A bottle warmer (that will talk to the Mimo and warm the bottle as the baby wakes up!). And other devices that fit into what we’re calling the Smart Nursery.
Life as a Mimo Dad is pretty cool :).
