my dog's ear infection

Time to get real - no more tired intros about how this post wasn’t written by AI, because I suppose you all get it by now, and anyway, this new feature is actually super cool and useful, and I don’t want anything to distract from it.

Not to mention, my claude-bot suspiciously told me that my AI-disavowing intros are getting boring, and I should stop writing them. But then I realized: that’s exactly what I would say if I were an AI robot. So ignore what I just said, I’m gonna keep doing them. Probably.

Last week, we took our dog to the vet. We have a toy poodle that gets long hair, and she’d been scratching around her ears a lot. After a short consultation (and a lot of little doggie wrangling), she was diagnosed with an ear infection. We left with 5 boxes of different medications, each of which must be given several times a day, in very specific ways, for several weeks.

My wife and I both work full time. I was already thinking about how we’re gonna keep track of all this without getting lost in our usual sea of real-time message clutter.

“The steroid pills need to be quartered. They’re flavored, so she’ll eat them directly.”

“Right,” I nodded, making a little slicing gesture with my hand.

“Cut the antibiotics in half and hide them in her food. Twice a day.”

“Ok.”

“3 ear drops, right ear, twice a day, for 3 weeks.”

“Uh huh,” I said, realizing my eyes were starting to get blurry.

“The ear cleaner and anti-fungal - a few times a day. Massage it around her ear.”

As I walked out of the vet’s office, rapidly forgetting everything I just heard, I was grateful that my wife took a video of that explanation. I just wasn’t looking forward to watching it 3 times a day to remember what to do.

So my glorious claude-bot and I built family medications.

You can now (finally) keep track of your family’s medications - for yourself, your children, and even your pets. Know what to give, when to give it, and how much. You can even store pictures of the medication bottle or label, just to be 100% sure we’re using the right pills. Because we all have trouble reading those tiny labels sometimes.

2 of the original beanies with our happy and fully healed doggie

To access family medications, simply open up your family pod (meet your beans) and tap any beanie (or pet beanie), and find the medications tab. You can even log doses, and view when your family members gave that last steroid pill to your doggy.

the next time you have to quarter a pill and keep track of how many times a day you gave it to your dog, you’ll thank me

Family medications keeps track of all the important big (and small) details you need when helping your little beanies (or doggies) heal and get better:

• What medications
• How many times a day
• The administration method (oral, drops, etc)
• Special notes about the medicine
• And, most importantly, dose logging. Who administered it, and when? I don’t want to give it twice by mistake when my wife already gave a dose

Forgot when you administered that last dose? Check beanies. Sharing the responsibility with your family members? Just tap on the bottle (in beanies, of course - not in real life. I already tried that, and it doesn’t work), and see when somebody in your family last gave those ear drops to your dog.

Special notification reminders for when it’s time to administer those all-important doses are in development now, and should be coming soon, along with some more exciting announcements.

This was one of the most user-requested features, so please let me know if you think this is useful!

📢 Big Announcement - the beanies.family community is on Discord! 📢

While we’re at it, there’s one more thing I’d like to announce: we have a discord!

There’s nothing I love more than chatting with my early adopter beanies - you are all a key part of the evolution of the platform, and I’ve built this community so I can hear about what you like (or hate) about our lovely app, so I can make sure it is always getting better. So join me on discord - it’s private, and I’m there all the time. Feedback, bugs, error reports, etc - it’s all good. Hope to see you there!

One thing, the discord invite links will expire after a certain number of users, so get in now before the early adopter community is full! Which is a number of beans that I haven’t decided yet, but I will, at some point.

Join us on Discord

While we’re at it, is there anything else you’d like me to add? Just drop me a line here (or on discord!) and let me know. Because nothing is more important than taking care of your little beanies.

Stay healthy, my friends.

greg