I'm a full-time mummy

One of my Facebook follower asked me to blog about how I prepare the solids for my girl when I posted pictures of my kids' meals on my Facebook page. So here it goes the tutorial for avocado puree:

** Personal Note: Choose an avocado the way you choose a mango. If it makes a dent when you press it, that means the avocado is ripe. If it is not ripe yet, just leave on the countertop and wait, or you can put it in a paper bag to speed up the ripening process.

** Personal Note: I use a spoon to scoop out the flesh. My preferance is to scoop until almost the skin - just like how we do for a papaya I guess...

** Personal Note: To store, just put the scooped out avocado into a container and freeze it. I didn't mash it before store as I prefer to mash it right before I feed my girl. To mashm i just use the back of my spoon and mash it. To feed, just scoop out the amount you want and add some breastmilk if you want some taste to it and feed!

Hope the above tutorial helps! Feel free to ask questions or share your feedback/experiences!

Welcome to the May 2012 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Parenting With or Without Extended Family

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have shared how relatives help or hinder their parenting. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

This month's Carnival of Natural Parenting touches on the topic of parenting either with or without extended family. I am joining in the blog hop this time as I want to share my 2 cents worth of the pros and cons of parenting with extended family.

Now, a brief intro in my family: Hubby and I with our 2 kids stay with hubby's mum. Both my parents and my FIL passed away years ago and hubby is the last child in the family (the rest of his siblings have their own house and own family) so, it just seem natural that we ended up staying with his mum. I'll just list down the pros and cons of parenting with extended family for easier reading:

PROS aka The Good Part!

1. An extra helping hand!

With 2 kids, I can seriously say I do need an extra hand from time to time to help just watch over one of my kid for even a few minutes. As my 1st child is 38 months old now, I can trust leaving him on his own to play with his Lego or MegaBloks or just switched on the TV for a while so I could catch up with some paperwork (I help out on the admin side of hubby's business and there are times I need to prepare quotation, invoice, PO, accounting and even filing for tax submission) but I can't do that for my 8 months old girl yet.

So, when my MIL is around, I will chuck my daughter or my son (if my girl is asleep) and asked my MIL to take care of them for a while. And believe me, often I will get my MIL to take care of my daughter when I really really have to go to the toilet!

But then again, I can't always rely on my MIL as she has sleeping problems... she sleeps at 6-7am and wakes up at 12-1pm and there are times when she goes for her outing and I don't have extra set of helping hands. Oh well, these are the times when I will just have to let my child (especially my girl) wails while I finish up my tasks ASAP!

In summary, my MIL is a great help in the family, she cooks for our dinner meals and take cares of my kids when I really needed to (but not for long though)

2. Another point of view

Sometimes in the matter of childcare, another point of view is good so that you can see from a different perspective. You know how they always say old folks know more than you? Something like that, I guess...

CONS aka The Sucky Part!

1. Hindrance to disciplining our child

You know how often grandparents tend to spoil their grandchildren? Yeah... and somehow my kids (especially my boy) are good in knowing where and who to go to when they get into trouble. Who else but grandma! This is bad when we are trying to discipline our child and then you see my MIL rushing in to defend and protect our child.

When situations like this arise, we will tell MIL nicely and firmly to stay out of this as it is important for us to discipline him now rather than ignoring it and let the world discipline him next time when he's grown up!

2. Another point of view

Yes, I mentioned this as a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing. Old folks ESPECIALLY CHINESE tend to believe in old beliefs without roots or basis and logic. Whenever you tell them something and why you do this, they will tell you don't because people long ago do so and so. When you asked them who tell them or why mustn't we do that, they can't answer you but just tell you 'Just listen to what old folks tell you, don't be disrespectful!'

3. Bad influence

Yes, grandparents can be a bad influence to our children. Many times we caught MIL giving Ben sugary snacks and even soft drinks and it takes A LOT of repeating and arguments to get the message across to her. Sigh, and with child number 2 now, I have twice caught my MIL feeding her crackers, despite telling her not to give her those foods.

There you go...

I think it is good to have extended family around. It gives a sense of belonging to a larger scale of family root and we are also showing and displaying to our children how we should be treated when we get old one day...

So what about you? Do you parent with or without extended family?

I came across this image software and when I saw that it has watermark capabilities, I decided to request for a review copy of the full software. Being a SAHM who blogs and takes tons and tons of pictures of her 2 kids EVERY DAY, it is crucial that my pictures are copyrighted and protected. Of course, I'm no celebrity and my kids' pictures won't sell for big amount of money, but I feel it is important that the pictures I took and posted on my blog and Facebook page are protected and watermarked so that they do not get stolen and being used simply. Anyway, long story short, here goes my review for the "PearlMountain Image Converter":

Description from the product page:
"PearlMountain Image Converter is an efficient and convenient picture converter for batch converting and processing images.It allows you to convert images to other formats, resize, rotate, crop, add watermark, apply effects and add border to thousands of images at a time. With one click your digital photos will be just right for the Web, blog, e-mail, photo printing, Facebook, MySpace, mobile phone..etc. This batch image format converter supports 60+ image formats, including the most popular ones: JPEG, BMP, TIFF, PNG, PSD, GIF, TGA, ICO, PDF, RAW and many others."

The software is easy to download and install. The .exe file is about 5.5MB in size and once you installed and run the program, you will see the screen below. The user interface is simple and easy to navigate around. You choose the settings (on the left hand side area) which you want to set for the image and you load the image you want to convert or edit onto the right hand side work area. 

At the bottom of the screen, you choose the destination of the output image and you can also see a big blue Start button which you click when you want to start the conversion/edit process. Easy peasy!

The 2 features that impressed me most are the Border settings and the Watermark features. I get to put the border on my image, select the border colors, the width of the border by percentage or pixels. It would be great if there are ready made border templates to choose from hehehe!

As for the Watermark features, I love that I can select to use image as the watermark or put in text as the watermark. For those of you who are familiar with the watermark logo I put on my images, I actually use Powerpoint to do the watermarking process, I am not a graphics person and that's the way I've been used to doing and since it works out great so far I've got no complains! But when I try out the watermark feature in this software, whoa... I'm blown away... I love it! It totally cuts off a number of steps I have to take in order to watermark a picture and this is one feature that got me hooked to this software! I'm impressed! I can choose where to position the image watermark, then choose whether to rotate it or the opacity of the image watermark! Cool, cool, cool!

I like that I can choose the output format of the picture! One glance of the settings on the Format and I can easily choose which format to output to (normally I would have to select from a drop-down menu bar in some of those image softwares I use prior to this)

I totally like that I can save the settings I commonly use under a profile, meaning if I normally use certain settings for images I put on my Facebook page, I can save it under a profile name 'My Facebook' for example. This will then allow me to continue using the same settings over and over again in the future without needing to reset everything again. How convenient!

Room for Improvement?

* Currently, under the Correction settings, you can play around with the brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness/blurness and the effect of the picture (original or grayscale). I would very much like it if they can come up with a button to auto correct the image for me (like in one of the image software I use prior to this). You know, just a click of a button and it auto corrects the image to the best possible outcome (better adjusted brightness, sharpness, contrast etc) I would also like if they can have a button to choose the bloom and/or backlight settings for the image.

Summary of Feedback

This is a very good, useful and user-friendly image software! I would definitely be keeping this on my computer and continue using this! Check out the 2 images samples I played with! Lovely, lovely!

You can purchase this software at: http://www.batchimageconverter.com/image-converter/purchase.html

I received no monetary compensation for this review, I was provided with the product for free using Tomoson.com in order to facilitate my review. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers. Please do your own research when purchasing products, as your opinions may differ from mine.