Monthly Archives: October 2009

Sometimes it ain’t all it’s crack up to be!

I won’t deny the fact that I can be a scrooge sometimes. I am of the opinion that it would be silly if I don’t get loads of something that I normally buy for a cheaper price when I can or when it is on special. This is one way that we can save on our grocery bills. It’s one of those things that I really love about the shopping here in Australia. Sadly, Malaysian do not have this luxury.

I also think that not all expensive items are really worth what you pay for. This is why I also love shopping at K-mart and Target. These are places where some things can be really cheap and worth every cent too. One of the things that I especially like about Kmart is that the price you see isn’t always what you pay for. Sometimes what is printed on the price tag is cheaper and you’ll only know once you check it out which is why I always the barcode scanner that can be found throughout the complex.

More often than not, I always end up paying less than the printed price. I love it! ;)

Wish us luck!

I’ve never really entered either of the girls into any baby competition and recently, I actually missed out on a really good one. It was a Bond’s baby comp where the winner would be in the 2010 winter catalogue. Wasted right? :( O well….I blame it on me for procrastinating but this time, I thought I will enter another one and see how we go. :)

It’s by our local paper and the winner gets a a gift voucher. It’s not much but heck, it’s still something right? So I’ll be entering KR for it since Arianna has passed the age limit. It’s from ages until 2 years and Arianna is more than 2 years. Anyway, we’ll be entering for :

Cheekiest smile
Cheekiest Smile

and

Biggest smile
Biggest Smile

So wish us luck! :D

I miss my pups

Recently just down the main road, there was a Pet Fest held by the city council. It’s an annual thing and once again, I missed it! It’s most likely the same reason why we didn’t know the last time as it was this time. It’s either Ted was working OR we were going to the ILs. Either way, we didn’t go and it was slightly upsetting. Somehow it was a little bit more upsetting this year as I was really looking forward to exposing Arianna to animals in real life.

Like me, she’s very into animals and the fest had free rides and an animal petting corner which I’m sure she would have loved! That girl doesn’t know what fear is and is a totally hands-on person which I am really happy about. Anyway, thinking about the fest really made me miss my pups back home. I mean, they are not pups anymore but like kids, they will always be ‘pups’ to me.

I always think of them and how mum made their pet beds from this really hard and tough box I brought home from my previous office. Although it was simple, they both love it lots coz it’s got their smelly blanket and it’s a little raised as well. Hence it keeps out the wind and it really does look cosy.

It’s really cute to see them curled up for the night and sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can hear them snoring – in sync!! *lol* They are such a cute bunch….gosh, I really miss them!!! :(

Getting into shape

Did I tell you that I can now fit into my pre-preggers jeans??? (“,)

YES!! It’s true….and I couldn’t believe it myself, until I actually got into them. What triggered this move was simply the fact that the jeans that I normally wear or what I wore right after the birth was literally falling off. The joke of it all was that it never crossed my mind that I had *actually* lost weight that my pants were falling off. *slaps forehead* Goes to show how much thought goes into thinking of trivial matters. ;)

My secret to the weight loss is apparently, according to my mum is eating oats. Since my mum was with me for abt 3 months after KR came along, we’ve sort of been eating oats for breakfast almost everyday. It wasn’t a weight loss plan or anything like that and please don’t ask me what the best weight loss pill is, cause I have no idea at all! It’s simply because we both like it lots. And on top of the fact that I am breastfeeding KR exclusively is definitely a big help too. :) I’m really glad that I am losing that weight since it has boosted my self-esteem and I feel pretty too.

Hey, perhaps I should start teaching Arianna to call me ‘Yummy Mummy’! :D

The joys of motherhood

Since becoming a mom, I have to say that I’ve had good days and bad days. Some days, I just want to auction the kids off on eBay to the lowest bid just so I can get rid of them and on other days, I feel so blessed and privilege to be their mom. Needless to say, I guess it’s the balance of these that has since kept me sane.

I recently had a moment which left me in a state of blurness. I really didn’t know how to deal with it so I just sat amidst the situation and soaked in what one would call the joys of motherhood, sarcastically.

Being home alone with the girls is no big deal. Ted is off to work and I’m at home to deal with them, no biggie. But what happens when the biggest one starts to whinge and cry and carry on? Well, somehow, this constant whinging on Arianna’s part always tends to trigger off some sort of chain reaction in KR. If Arianna carries on, so will KR and then it sort of becomes a relay crying tag team. Arianna cries and KR gets stressed out and starts crying, then Arianna cries louder coz she gets stressed over KR’s crying which then in turn makes KR cry even louder coz the crying is slowly escalating. Get my drift?

There I was with one arm carrying a crying and stressed out baby and a toddler clinging to my waist, bawling her eyes out and both are snotty…what do I do? I burst out laughing at my sad and tragic situation wishing I could just record this but couldn’t as my hands are obviously full. So what do I then do, after I’ve stopped laughing? Well, I simply take it all in stride. I chuck the baby on the rocker and Arianna back into her cot. Calm the baby down by which time Arianna has also calmed down and we are all one happy family again. :D

Sounds so simple but at the time, I was lost and blur. Funny now when I think back but not so at that time! Ahh…the joys of motherhood.

Having to deal with a tag-team relay of screaming/crying, snotty kids clinging on for comfort.

Hair removal method gone wrong….

All methods have tricked me with their promises of easy, painless removal – the Epilady, the standard razor, the scissors, the Nair, the EpilStop, and now… The Wax.

My night began as any other normal weekday night. I came home from work, fixed dinner for my son and we played for a while. I then had the thought that would ring painfully in my mind for the next couple hours: maybe I should use that wax in my medicine cabinet. I set up my boy with a video and headed to the site of my demise, um, I mean bathroom.

It was one of those cold wax kits. No melting a clump of hot wax, you just rub the clear strips in your hand, peel them apart, press it on your leg (or wherever) and ignore the frantically rising crescendo of string instruments in the background. No muss, no fuss. How hard can this be? I mean, I’m not the girly-est of girls but I’m mechanically inclined so maybe I can figure out how this works. You’d think.

So I pull one of the thin strips out. It’s two strips facing each other, stuck together. I’m supposed to rub it in my hand to warm and soften the wax (I’m guessing). I go one better: I pull out the hair dryer! And heat the SOB to ten thousand degrees. Cold wax, my ass. (Oh, how that phrase will come back to haunt me.)

I lay the strip across my thigh. I hold the skin around it and pull. OK, so it wasn’t the best feeling in the world, but it wasn’t bad. I can do this! Hair removal no longer eludes me! I am Sheera, fighter of all wayward body hair and smooth skin extraordinaire!

With my next wax strip, I move north. After checking on the boy and verifying that he was, in fact, becoming one with Bear and learning all about smells, I sneak into the bathroom for The Ultimate Hair Fighting Championship. I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet. Using the same procedure, I then apply the wax strip across the right side on my bikini line, covering the right half of my vagina and stretching up into the inside of the right ass cheek. (Yeah, it was a long strip.)

I inhale deeply. I brace myself.

RRRIIIIPPP!!!!

I’m blind! Blind from the pain!… Vision returning. Oh crap. I’ve managed to pull off half an inch of the strip. Another deep breath. And… RRRIIIPP! Everything is swirly and tie-dyed? Do I hear crashing drums? OK, coming back to normal again. I want to see my trophy – my wax covered pelt that caused me so much agony. I want to revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold the wax strip like an Olympic gold medallist. But why is there no hair on it? Why is the wax mostly gone? Where could the wax go, if not on the strip?

Slowly, I eased my head down, my foot still perched on the toilet. I see hair – the hair that should be on the strip. I touch. I feel. I am touching wax. I look to the ceiling and silently shout “nooooooo!!” And realize I have just begun living my own personal version of “The Tar Baby.”

I peel my fingers off the softest, most sensitive part of my body that is now covered in cold wax and matted hair, and make the next big mistake – up until this point, you’ll remember, I’ve had my foot on the toilet. I know I need to move, to do something. So I put my foot down on the floor. And then I hear the slamming of the cell door. Vagina? Sealed shut. Ass? Sealed shut.

A little voice in my head says, “I hope you don’t have to shit anytime soon. Your head just might pop off.” I penguin walk around the bathroom trying desperately to figure out what I should do next. Hot water! Hot water melts wax! I’ll run the hottest water I can stand and get in – the wax should melt and I can gently wipe it a way, right? Wrong!

I get in the tub – the water is slightly hotter than is used to torture prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment. And I sit. Now the only thing worse than having your goodies glued together is having them glued together and then glued to the bottom of a tub. In scalding hot water. Which, by the way, does not melt the cold wax. So now I’m stuck to the tub.

I call my friend, C, because she once dropped out of beauty school so surely she has some secret knowledge or trick to get wax off skin. It’s never good to start a conversation with “So my ass and vagina are stuck to the tub.”

She doesn’t have a trick. She does her best to suppress laughter. She wants to know exactly where the wax is on the ass. “Are we talking cheek or hole, here?” she asks. She isn’t even trying to hide the giggles now. I give her the run-down of the entire night. She tells me to call the number on the side of the box, but to have a good cover story for where the wax actually is. “You know that if we were working the help line at XX Wax Co. and somebody called with their entire crack sealed shut, we’d just put them on hold then record the conversation for everyone we know. You’re going to end up on a radio show or the internet if you tell them the truth.

While we go through various solutions, I have resorted to scraping the wax off with a razor. Boy, nothing feels better to the girly goodies than covering them in wax, sticking them to a tub in super hot water and THEN dry shaving the sticky wax off!

In the middle of the conversation (which has inexplicably turned to other subjects!) I find the little, beautiful saving grace that is the lotion provided with wax to remove the excess. I rub some in and start screaming, “It’s working! It’s working!” I get hearty congratulations from C and we hang up.

I successfully remove all the wax and notice, to my dismay, that the hair is still there. So I shaved the damned stuff off. Hell, I was numb by that point anyway. And then I put the box of wax back in my medicine cabinet. Never know when a moustache might start to come in.

Tonight, I attempt hair dying.

*No, please rest assure that this is NOT, I repeat, NOT me. I wouldn’t be able to survive it ~ really. However, it must be my GREATEST (& favourite) CnP effort EVER! :P Cracks me up each time I read it although I pity this woman. ROTFLOL!! I dont EVER wanna be in her place which is the reason why I’ve sworn off waxing or any other hair removal methods except shaving. ;) After all I got me own horror stories. Another time maybe…. ;) O, thanks Amara!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GODMA!!

It’s my sister’s birthday today!! :) She turns 26 and wow, I can’t believe that she is my ‘little’ sister. lol Gosh, that really reminds me that I am OLD….. :P There is a 5 year age gap between us and growing up, I don’t think were that close as siblings. But I’m glad to say that these days, it’s a whole lot better. Being my only sister, she also happens to be Arianna’s godmother. They both happen to be pigs too. LOL Yea, this is with reference to the Chinse zodiac. There are 12 animals in the calendar. I am a horse, KR is a cow, Ted’s a pig as well and mum’s a snake. So we really do have a nice ‘zoo’ community going on here. ;)

Anyway, what I wanted to get her for her birthday was a pair of breeches. You see, she is an absolute horse nutter. She is just obsessive over horses and almost everything she owns has some sort of relation to a horse. But since this wasn’t possible, I did the next best thing that I could. :) I sew a 2 pillow cases with this horse fabric I got online. I had it posted out to her early and being the cheeky piggy that she is, she didn’t wait till today to open the present but opened it the day it arrived!! So although it wasn’t a proper birthday surprise, it was still a surprise she really liked. And I’m glad….

Happy Birthday, sis. May all your dreams come through and that you will always be blessed. Love you!!

It’s going to be a long night tonight…

Unlike the Black Eye Peas, my ‘song’ title is different. ;) Like any other baby, I guess KR still trying to get into a more structured routine. And although I am not into the extreme 50′s method of how to bring up your child ie. you don’t pick your child up unless it for a nappy change or a feed. Isn’t that just ridiculous?? However, I do have my own methods which I hope to get into play as soon as possible.

Initially, I let KR have her own way and since she was a newborn, most of what we did was on demand like her feeding and nap times. But since she will be turning 6 months in a few weeks, she has got a tiny routine happening on her own. But as for me, I’m trying to her to follow Arianna’s routine so that my life will be easier and I will find that I do not need to use any under eye creams to mend all those sleepless nights of waking up for feeds. I know it’s part and parcel of having a baby, but what if you could have it such a way that both kids are down for their sleeps at the same time? :D That would be just awesome but as we are slowly getting there, sadly…I am still up because I know that in mere minutes KR will be up for her ‘morning’ feed. ;) However, I foresee this feed to soon end once she starts on solids.

Thumbs up for thumb sucking!

I am proud to announce that we officially have another thumbsucker in the houze! :)

Official thumbsucker
God gave us thumbs for a reason.

There is so much talk about pacifiers V thumbsucking and needless to say that I’m all for thumbsucking. It makes me feel even better to know that thumbsuckers makes better self-settlers too and with both girls now thumbsucking, I have no complaints. I read somewhere that there was this mother who was so paranoid about germs and what not that she brings with her 5-6 pacifiers when she goes out. I think that is absolutely ridiculous! I honestly think that it’s kids like these who tend to fall ill more easily since they are so sensitive to germs. A little bit of dirt never hurt anyone and I love how Ted words it – “It builds character!”.

That said, I’m not saying that you should allow your kid to go lick the pathways but all I’m saying is that as parents, we always want whats best for our kids and I know that most parents have their own opinion and reasoning for doing things their way and I respect that. We have to agree to disagree but right now, in my blog…I think what other people say is just nonsense! To me, if my child is calm and soothed by thumbsucking, then it gets a thumbsup from me. I’ll deal with the bucked teeth later.