What Simply Works!

I’m so happy that Spring is almost here!  I’m enjoying the warmer weather, I can slowly veer away applying thick slabs of moisturizer on my face and body several times a day, which is so troublesome to say the least.   And I’m so glad that I escaped the long winter season without seeing a dermatologist or getting acne treatments.  It will be very expensive to get skin treatments here for sure.

Since my daughter started going to daycare or “school” as how I refer daycare to her, she seems to have lost interest in watching her DVDs.  She has become more active and wanting to draw, scribble and do more “fun” stuff.  Not that televisions are all bad.  I still remind her to watch her favorite DVDs from time to time.  But right now, I can see that she’s enjoying this stage where she’s learning things outside our home.

It is known to our family and friends that my husband enjoys living in Australia.  Between the two of us, he is more vocal to share that here is where he wants to eventually buy a house, a second car and send our kids to school.  In short, to settle.  In between his thoughts, I would tease him that he’d buy my vote (to settle in Sydney) if he’d buy me a new SUV.  He’d ride on the joke and say, “Of course! Even if it’s a UTE (Aussie slang for pick-up truck) that you want plus tons of truck accessories to dress it up, I’ll get it for you.”  That of course, comes with a wink and a loud laughter after.

With the sudden growth of my belly on my 8th month of pregnancy, I’m a bit alarmed with the potential size of my baby at the time of delivery. Although all along I’ve been careful with my food intake.  I don’t believe in eating in big portions just because I’m supposed to be eating for two.  I know that it will only make me and the baby bigger but not necessarily healthy.  I hope the baby continues to steadily grow in average size and that after I give birth, I won’t have a hard time going back to my pre-pregnancy weight.  Or else, I will be on the lookout for natural fat burners in the market.

For some reason, I always get goosebumps whenever I am at a hospital.  There’s something about the whole hospital smell, seeing very sick patients or being in a room full of high-tech machines (AED included) that just give me the chills.  Even now that I’m frequenting a hospital in the city because of my pregnancy check-ups, I still have to condition myself that I shouldn’t feel scared or worried being there.  Sigh.  I hope I won’t feel this way when I get admitted on my D-day.

With our almost eight years of home rental experience (six years in Singapore, nearly two years in Australia), we’ve learned not to mess with the walls.  At one point, we displayed frames upon frames of our favorite photos in an apartment we leased in Singapore only to find out that it would cost as so much to fix and repaint each hole that we made.  So up until we have a place of our own, we will not attempt to pin photo frames or TV mounts on our walls.

Some say no matter how they stick to an exercise regimen and a healthy diet, their weight still won’t go down.  But I guess, there really is no easy way to slim down except of course through crash dieting or popping diet pills.  But for those who feel that the only route to slimming is through pills, they should consider reading phentermine reviews or related information to make sure that the pills are safe.  Better yet, go see a doctor and get recommendations.

Target launched their major toy sale a few days ago and of course we had to go there to avail of the huge discounts.  Unfortunately, we were there yesterday, which is a Saturday and most of the toys I had planned of buying were off the shelves already.  Sob.

Because of that I have to resort back to online shopping and check out if the same toys and video games are available at shopwiki.com.  Hopefully the prices are reasonable.  Funny that my only nephew is pining for a Transformers robot and not the equally popular but more expensive Wii games.  He’s saving his aunt a few hundred bucks for wishing for a robot instead. Ha!

Or maybe, I should bring home our Wii console and let the kids back home enjoy it.  It doesn’t come with a lot of Wii accessories but I don’t mind buying a few (e.g. additional Wii remote or Wii steering wheel) need be.

As we prepare for the coming of our new baby, my husband and I have been busy almost all weekends since my second trimester cleaning and organizing our home.  I am so proud of my husband for taking on a big part of the cleaning part and giving room to meet my cleanliness ’standards’.  I coached him on how to properly clean the kitchen and bathroom details, leading to sparkling and clean walls and faucets (as if they are brand new Danze faucets!).  Soon, we would be able to share most of the chores again but I’m glad that I saw the willingness in him to help and make things work around the house.

I have been sharing on my blogs lately, how, my appetite has greatly increased now that I’m on my third trimester of pregnancy.  I am trying my darnest best to control my sugar intake but there are instances where I just couldn’t resist a few more bites of a chewy choco chip cookie or a bit more serving of ice cream.  Many of my friends are saying that being pregnant is my license to eat whatever I want but I really don’t believe that.  I continue to remind myself that I should give my unborn baby a good headstart to a healthy life by eating mostly the healthy stuff.  And that includes not having to take any diet pills or Apidexin no matter how much weight I gained.

I am so looking forward to the Spring season.  It opens up opportunities for the family to go out and spend weekends outdoors.  And now that my little girl is turning three, we’re looking at exposing her to more physical activities like riding bikes or swimming (but probably this coming summer).  We hope she’d take up at least one sport, one that she’d love doing until she grows up.  Her little brother could follow suit someday.  But I hope he will not choose a rugged sport that will present physical harm, like dropping off high skateboard ramps perhaps?

Each time we hear of news about a swine flu-related death, I can’t help but think about the likelihood of our vacation trip in November to be postponed.  Of course, our priority is our kids and the worst thing we’d do is ignore the health hazard traveling poses especially so that the swine flu virus is still on high alert these days.  There’s no medical insurance (or rop life insurance) that could safeguard our lives and health.  Better safe, than sorry.

My daughter is turning three in a few months’ time.  It is just amazing to see her grow right before my eyes.  She’s fast becoming her own person, with likes and dislikes and her own quirkiness.

Soon, she’ll be asking me to take her out for shopping, she will soon ask me about clothes, shoes, jewelry and all things girly.  I hope she’d grow up to be confident though and not self-conscious.  The last thing I’d want is for her to be curious about diet pills or nuphedra, for example.  Sigh.  Time flies so fast.

I like dressing up my little girl. Save for winter season when she’s usually donned in jackets and sweaters, I like dressing her up in girly-girl clothes like blouses, skirts and dresses in cute prints.

I also like it if she wears any of the trinket-like jewelry given to her by her two grandmas. She’s definitely all girl! Ha ha. When she gets a wee bit older, I would like to get her a heart pendant necklace. I love simple jewelry designs and I’m sure a heart pendant will look good on her.

This is my daughter’s latest favorite DVD, Wiggles Big, Big Show.  It’s a live concert held in Sydney last December.  It is packed with a lot of songs and of course dancing.

My daughter started memorizing the lyrics the first time she saw this DVD.  It is very entertaining that I stayed on to watch the whole show with my little girl.  It is highly recommended.

I remember feeling so excited for my daughter when she became a flower girl for the first time.  The excitement was mainly on seeing her wear a tiny and fluffy gown adorned with flowers.  She looked like a princess, if I may say so.

Now that our second child is a boy, I’m equally excited and looking forward to the day that he’ll be wearing a nice tux, complete with tuxedo shirt, a tie and shiny black shoes and become a part of a wedding entourage, too.  Too cute!

It is a lot easier to modify Wordpress templates when it is done offline or when Wordpress is installed locally on your computer.  I thought I wouldn’t need to resort to a locally installed WP but the last time I was tinkering with a theme, it took ages for the updates to load on my test site!

Installation is easy, in fact, there are tons of guidelines you can Google out there.  But this is what I have used along with setting up ‘xampp’ on a Mac.  Try it out!

http://www.lifespy.com/2007/how-to-install-wordpress-offline/

http://www.keitr.com/tutorials/xampp

Too bad that we can no longer plan weekend activities like we used to.  With the current back pain I’m dealing with, the husband decided that it’s best to minimize activities that entail long walks or long drives.  Sob.

I wanted to bring my daughter to the zoo but we never managed to because of the errands that occupied our past weekends.  She’s learning animals from books and DVDs and it would be nice if she’d see them all in person.  She knows a fair bit of zoo animals and for sure she’ll squeal in delight if she sees a real life giraffe, zebra, turtle or horse (complete with horse supplies).  Aah, maybe someday.

This coming July and August, my mother, mother-in-law and husband will be celebrating their birthdays.  Because of that, I’ve been practicing my little girl to sing the Happy Birthday song for each of them.  What amuses me though is the part where she will pretend to blow candles, too.  Right at the end of the song, she’ll say “Okay, blow. 1, 2, 3″.  So cute!

It’s another exciting time for Wordpress users.  Release 2.8 is out and some users out there (like me) has an interesting story to share about our upgrade experience.

I have a total of six blogs.  Five of them were successfully upgraded to the new version using the one-click install (or upgrade) function.  But for some reason, the function didn’t work on my personal blog (yep, my main blog of all blogs).  As soon as I refreshed my browser, my blog went kaput!  I waited for a couple of minutes but nothing happened.

Then I tried to log in to the admin panel but even the URL doesn’t work!  Caramba!  After a few minutes of panic, I remember my back-ups.  And thank God for them! He he.  I reloaded my latest back-up and got the blog running again.

Sigh.  Now I need to figure out how to upgrade it minus the glitch.