If it seems like you are building your plans around your child, it is for a good reason. You could have taken trips without him in the past, but this is the first time that he’s big enough to understand that there really is a world out there. So make it as fun as you can. Also, a wise traveling family should consider getting a travel health insurance for each of the members. This type of insurance will reimburse expenses related with your health while in a foreign country.

There are also insurance schemes that are designed to handle delayed flights, cancelled flights, travel misconnections, delayed luggages, lost luggages and lost travel documents.

For kid-friendly trips, I recommend the following:

• A Disney Cruise
• A Trip to Harry Potter’s Hometown in the UK, and
• A visit to Hershey’s

Have fun!

One of the topics discussed included the keeping of a baby’s umbilical cord; yes, that soft tissue that is discarded when a child is born. Well, in our culture, this is kept as a keepsake; pasted on a scrapbook for immortalization, or hung on walls (for more superstitious families).

What we failed to talk about was that this tissue and the blood inside it can be preserved and used for various medical purposes later on. Here’s a story of how this works: Read about one family that was helped by their decision to preserve their child’s cord blood using Cryo-Cell. Here’s how to do it ENROLL, and here are some SPECIAL OFFERS.

Some women prefer to keep the remnants of their child’s cord in a photo album when it dries up. I didn’t though, as I was scared of how a rotting tissue will be regarded by microbes that abound in our immediate environment. So I got rid of it (gasp!).

I am not superstitious nor too sentimental about it, and I also did not know about services that work to preserve blood and tissue from umbilical cords. If I had known, though, I would have enrolled.

New mom

• you have muscle pains; bunched up muscles up there on your shoulders and near the crook of your elbow.
• you feel a weird emptiness near your tummy region, and that saddens you somehow; making you a bit weepy at times as you feel like your child has decided to live on his own without your help. Then you rouse yourself and realize that you’re being silly.
• you keep fuzzy sleeping habits; and your breasts feel weird (and sore)
• you know one of two colors only: blue or pink
• you’re out to buy a new stroller after hours of browsing a website selling a Maclaren stroller
• you see your mom in a different light
• you feel compelled to smile at and be friendly to all moms you meet on the street (like you have just become a member of a secret society)

Nonetheless, congratulations and welcome to the club!

^_^

And so, to the cabinets and big luggage they went. Until one day, I realized that he will never be able to wear them if I kept them too long.

It’s no wonder that some of the ‘hand-me-down’ clothes we get from friends look like they have never been used. Most probably, those moms kept their baby’s good clothes inside a cabinet ’til they forgot about them. Today, I made my baby wear his Church clothes even when it’s not going-out time. They are shrinking before my very eyes and they have never been worn!

For fleshy women like I and some friends, having a waistline and/or an ample bust line was enough to get us by. We went to the gym when we wanted, binged when we wanted, and starved ourselves when we wanted. Little did I know that my weight loss secret then is something that I will never have now.

Youth.

So… I’m not giving up. Getting older means putting more effort on getting the waistline narrower. Now, if only it were that easy.

The best tip I received from other moms is to find a brand that has perfectly fitted sizes, relative to your child’s size of course. I found myself getting to know baby clothing brands that don’t have exact sizes for 2 or 3 year olds, and also some baby brands that fit perfectly. A nice way to start being brand loyal eh?

Salesladies would ask moms “is your baby fat?” and “is your baby tall for his age?”. While my son is average in size, from a doting mom’s perspective, he could be fat to others and thin to some, which makes the whole buying kid clothes thing a little more difficult.

It’s a good thing that babies grow up so fast that we won’t even have to worry about toddler sizes for long. Soon, we are going to have to worry about bigger kid clothes, and that’s another story.

The biggest video game buff of course is the dad, who gets to learn the ropes first before I and AJ do. We already have the latest gadgets, except playstation 3, which we COULD buy, but we won’t for now because we still have other Nintendo games to discover and play… as a family.

Maybe this video game craze has kept some people apart because one or 2 members are in another world, but I have to say, having similar interests certainly made us closer.

The best places to take toddlers and infants would be the Shark Reef (Mandalay Bay), and the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat for some underwater fun at the Mirage and MGM Lion Habitat.

We are well into the second half of this year, and so far, this has been the best year of my life. The second part of the year has always excited me, but now that I have AJ, my excitement meter is almost bursting. First there’s Halloween, then Christmas and then New Year. This year is the first year that my son can fully participate in the activities connected with these holidays; because he’s bigger now and can fit into the halloween costumes I’ll make him wear.

The things I must plan for include the birthdays of the most important men in my life; and these entail one major restaurant theme party and one major open house party at home. These event planning things go right up my alley, but my major dilemma is getting the men involved to participate. I may have to bribe them into doing the stuff that I want them to do, like dress up like comic book characters in tandem, i.e. father and son (Superman and Superboy). I used to never understand how stage mothers feel, but now I do! And, hopefully, the little pinoy devil will feel like a star so much that I can continue being one.

One how-to tip on getting the men excited about holiday events and parties told me to center the craft activities around things they like. During Halloween they can cut-out and color the bat and spiderweb decorations together, while I cook the pastries. For Christmas, they can do the tree. My men love to over-think things and I might just get red bats and a multicolored Christmas tree! AJ in particular colors like a crazed house painter, but his color schemes match so well, you can even call them art!

She is just the socialite we love to watch, make fun of and gossip about. But a new tidbit was released and it seems that the Paris that we know could be a put on!

I found this on daily dish. It seems that Miss Simple Life gets paid to party, which isn’t new info really, but in the article she claims that who she is really is so different from her socialite persona. The photo of her on that article shows her in a simple do and with a simple cross adornment around her neck; not much make up; and a gentle smile. Is this their way of saying that ‘THIS is the REAL Paris Hilton”?

If i didn’t know any better, I’d say that the party girl who got imprisoned for DUI is a completely different person, and definitely NOT this simple, blonde and demure Christian girl with the nice smile.

She’s claiming that her dedicated partying was indeed ‘just work’. Then, maybe I have something in common with the fab Paris Hilton. We are both workaholics.