Healthy Recipe: Pinakbet

For moms and dads who are looking for healthy food for their family meals, here is a popular Filipino dish from the north to add to your dinner recipe collection.

7 Tips When Traveling with Your Baby

The idea of traveling sounds like a dream, doesn't it? You get to visit beautiful places, meet interesting people, experience the beauty of the local culture, and (of course) take home some rare souvenirs. Well, at least that's what the ads always portray.
Now let's put a baby in this picture. Aside from tending to all of your traveling needs, you have to consider the baby's needs as well. Birth certificate, travel documents, his own suitcase filled with clothes and diapers, his baby bottles, his large can of milk (if he's bottle fed), toys, etc.

Stressful, isn't it? Well, traveling with a baby isn't a joke even if you're only taking flights within the country. You have to consider the best times to travel, the things you need to bring, the health of your baby, and who you're flying with. I've had to fly to and fro several times back when my daughter was only a couple of months old, and the stress and work that came with the task was fun yet demanding.

10 Practical and Affordable Things To Do This Summer

Ever the Azkals fan, Naomi wrote about soccer camp or football for kids this summer. Her blogpost inspired me to make my own version of things for the kids to do during this 2 month long vacation. Here are a few more suggestions for fun and educational activities that you could do with your kids.

Coming from a practical and thrifty stay-at-home hands-on parent, it kind of requires more time & planning than usual. But then again you won’t be spending a fortune on fees and lessons.

Mom Notes Partners with MomCenter

Dear Moms,
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We encourage you to sign up at MomCenter.com.ph, where you could interact with thousands of other Filipina moms (and dads maybe?) in this extensive online parenting community.

Life Is What Happens

I was going to post a series of comic strips based on humorous events around my house with two wild kiddos and their harried homebased writer/artist of a mom. Dad and college kid home-for-the-summer will be playing best supporting actors for a cast of five. I even asked the hubby to do the sketches for me. However, both our artistic mojos have all but been lost in the day-to-day of mother/fatherhood, so that he was able to do only one very lifelike cartoon character sketch of the youngest, and nothing else.

To save the day (or at least the blog post for my scheduled day of posting) I attempted, with my lesser drawing skills, to do ‘em sketches myself. I did make passable drawings there on the sketchpad, I am proud to say. Why are they not here then? Oh, it’s because I lost the drawings in the clutter of my household. I missed a week of posting because of this. Told ya I was harried.

How to Raise Well-Rounded Achievers

[You may also view this article on MomCenter.com.ph.]
For the past couple of weeks, I've been seeing a lot of Facebook friends posting graduation and recognition photos of their children/nephews/nieces/grandchildren.

I posted one myself of me and my daughter Nini, who was awarded second honorable mention and was named Most Cheerful/Most Gentle in her first-grade class (so proud of her!). One of my Facebook friends, whose daughter took home tons of academic and extra-curricular awards after her high school graduation (and is an incoming freshman at the University of the Philippines to boot), caught my attention. I wondered, "How do you raise an achiever?"

What's the History Behind Your Child's Name?

Your child's life on this earth begins with his name. A name is the symbol, the identity which a person carries throughout every chapter of his life. His family, his friends, his enemies, his mentors, and up to the very last stranger he introduces himself to will recognize him by his name.

This is how important choosing a name for my daughter was to me. I wanted her name to be perfect and beautiful as it reflects how beautiful and special she is to me. The problem though is that choosing a name out of the millions of possible ones out there is just too difficult for me.