I'm a full-time mummy

I have been cutting down on doing product reviews since 2014 and only accepted those that I feel will definitely fit into our family dynamics (especially books on parenting or homeschooling stuff, family products, something along those genre)

Few months ago, I received an offer to review Adoken, which is a new local brand specialising in safe and natural personal care baby/kids products. So let's continue with my review below...

About the product:

"Adoken source main ingredients from quality suppliers from US and UK, formulates and produces it with local expertise and adheres to stringent quality control standards. Hence our products are as good as overseas brand, or even better to suit local tropical climate (in terms of its stability) and Asian skin’s nature, with very affordable pricing for your long terms need."

I received a bottle of Adoken Natural Orange Kids Body Wash for our review. The big bottle of 750ml contains orange essential oil and moisturizing Aloe Vera among the key ingredients. This body wash is formulated to care for kids' active lifestyle - protecting them from germs while keeping them smelling good and fresh.

I tried out the body wash on our 2 girls first. The body wash is transparent and very liquidy in texture. It has a nice citrusy orange-y smell to it when you lather it onto your body and you just need a small little dab and it does its job awesomely. After washing off, it does not leave any sticky or oily residue/feel and I like that!

I actually use the body wash on our kiddos from head to toe, it does not leave any stinging sensation in their eyes as I washes off the body wash from their hair.

Some good to know information about the body wash stated in the website is this body wash has 100% plant active ingredient, Tear-Free (proven by me using it on our kiddos from head to toe hah!), Sulfate, Paraben and Synthetic Fragrance Free, dermatologically tested and its gentle formula is suitable for normal as well as sensitive skin.

I'm down to the last few drops of body wash and very sad to see it finishing (2 months for 3 kiddos). But then again, I'm very happy and grateful to have the opportunity to review it, thank you Adoken!

For more info and other range of products, do check out Adoken website and Facebook page.

Also, 1 month from today's review post date, all my awesome fans are entitled for 15% discounts when buying Adoken products.

Just quote “I’m a full time mummy” when you place your order from them.

Do note that I received no monetary compensation for this review, I was provided with the product in order to facilitate my review. All opinions expressed in this post are my own. Please do your own research when purchasing products, as your opinions may differ from mine.

** Note: I have disabled the commenting feature on my blog engine thanks to all the spammers who happily spam my blog every day. If you wish to ask me any questions, you can find me at my Facebook page (I'm there almost everyday) or just drop me an email if you wish to maintain some anonymity.

We had recently spent a day at Sunway Lagoon and today I'll be sharing our experiences of our family outing there. Just in case you guys are not aware, school holidays has just started in Malaysia.

I had days before googled online for tips and what to take note of just in case I might missed out something when we arrived there. I packed our swimming stuff and brought 2 towels for our kiddos and a spare change of clothes for everyone. A few small packs of snacks for the kiddos only since I read that no outside food or drinks are allowed unless it's for the children. We didn't bring our stroller along as I feel it would be too cumbersome to lug around and had to worry about it as well. Anyway, we arrived at Sunway Lagoon at 11-ish am and I quickly went to get our complimentary tickets for the outing.

With the complimentary tickets, I went to the ticket counter to exchange them for our wristbands. At the main entrance, a staff will put on the wristband sticker on our wrists and we were welcomed in and the first thing we decided to do is to check out the Wildlife Park.

It was getting hotter by then and we managed to check out the tiger, white lion, black panther, some cute mini monkeys, otters and snakes before we decided it's time to head to the Wet Park.

I changed our kiddos into their swimming gears while hubby went off to load some cash onto his wristband and then went to rent a locker. Do note that there are few types of lockers which are available for rent:

- each time opening of locker will cost RM5

- small lockers unlimited opening/closing costing RM23

- big lockers unlimited opening / closing costing RM43

You can use cash or load the cash values onto your wristbands if you don't want to be bringing cash along. We left our wallets and belongings in our locker and load RM100 into our wristbands. All expenses incurred in the theme park can just easily be paid by swiping the barcode on your wristband. The remaining values in the wristbands can be redeemed at the gift shop on your way out of the theme park. Easy peasy!

I like that there are many benches and shades all around Sunway Lagoon, it helps when you are walking around with 3 kiddos and lugging your stuff along. Once we have all changed into our swimming suits and stuffed our belongings into a small locker, we head out to the big beach area. I brought along a plastic bag of necessity (water bottles for kiddos and ourselves, wet wipes, suntan lotion and goggles). Hubby rented a giant tube which we lug around everywhere we go (do not lose it as you will lose your deposit if you lose it!)

We spent quite a long time at the main beach area, enjoying the waves and then head on to the smaller pools with lots of playground for the kiddos and half a dozen rounds of river rides with our tubes. A few surprising and suffering moments for me (I'm terrified of water all over my face since I don't know how to swim) were when we went through this row of waterfalls as we sat on our tubes. I can't jump out of our tubes as our girls were sitting on my lap so I had to cover all 3 of us as we braved out of the waterfalls area.

We stopped for a while to have our late lunch (Burger King - reasonable price!) and resumed our water activities at the playground, main beach area (giant waves every few minutes by then which was really fun and exciting for our 3 kiddos) and decided it is time to slowly head home. We took a quick shower (lots of changing and shower rooms available though I wished there were soaps and shampoos provided hahaha) and changed into our spare clothes. It was already 5.30pm by the time we got ready to head home.

Then our 6.5 year old boy said he wanted to cross the bridge. Our eyes widened and since he insisted to cross it, we braved through and climbed up the stairs and crossed it. I was not afraid of heights (2 decades of staying in government flat at 15th floor, mehhh.. such height is nothing to me) but I was really tired as hubby and I took turns lugging our heavy load of wet clothes and towels since we were going to head home after that (we were told by staff there that lockers will automatically opened at 7pm and we don't think we could make it back the other side of the bridge to our locker in time, so we took out our belongings and lug it along.

We managed to cross the bridge and it was a satisfying feeling to do that with everyone in the family feeling victorious of conquering fears and etc lol!

I didn't manage to snap any pictures while we were in the wet park since my handphone was nicely stuffed into our locker ahahah.. but rest assured, there are staff all around the wet park ready to snap pictures of you and your family for memories. They will slap on a sticker band on your wrist which you can scan before you exit, where you can browse your pictures and decide whether to print them out and buy them back for memories and safekeeping. We bought 1 picture which costs us RM35.

All in all, it was a fun and tiring day for us. Weather was great except for about half hour of rain in the afternoon (we had our late lunch then so it was a great timing!) Sore muscles everywhere the day after (old already I guess!) What a nice way to enjoy our family outing!

The theme park has planned out a whole new range of exciting activities and enticing promotions from 21 November 2015 to 3 January 2016 so do come early (their opening hours is 10am to 6pm) to catch the dance performances (we managed to watch some Hawaiian dance real up close), clowns, DJ pool party, music band and more!

Btw, Malaysians celebrating their birthdays will enjoy FREE admission into Sunway Lagoon for a period of a week from their birthday, along with a meal voucher worth RM10, redeemable at F&B outlets within the park. Sunway Pals members also get a free double tube to add to the merriment. Sunway Lagoon will also offer a 30% discount off the entrance fee for up to four accompanying guests of the birthday boy or girl. How cool is that?! Aside from birthday celebrations, Sunway Lagoon also offers special promotion to celebrate senior citizens. Malaysian senior citizens over the age of 60 are able to enjoy Sunway Lagoon for FREE.

In addition to that, visitors will get to enjoy 30% off on normal admission rate via Sunway Lagoon 2 online promotion packages – Family Packages and 4 To Go*. With Family Packages, 2 adults and 2 kids would only cost RM 378, and that’s not all; the package comes with complimentary RM10 retail voucher and meal voucher. As for 4 To Go, 4 adults admission tickets would only cost RM420 and it comes with complimentary RM20 retail voucher.

For more information on Sunway Lagoon, call 603 5639 0000 or log on to Sunway Lagoon’s website at www.sunwaylagoon.com or its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/SunwayLagoonMalaysia

Do note that I received no monetary compensation for this review, I was provided with the complimentary tickets for our family in order to facilitate my review. All opinions expressed in this post are my own. Please do your own research when purchasing products, as your opinions may differ from mine.

** Note: I have disabled the commenting feature on my blog engine thanks to all the spammers who happily spam my blog every day. If you wish to ask me any questions, you can find me at my Facebook page (I'm there almost everyday) or just drop me an email if you wish to maintain some anonymity.

I came across this article which I must definitely share with you guys as I'm very interested to know your thoughts on this. Do note that sharing this does not mean I agree or disagree with it. For your convenience, I have copied the excerpts from the article here:

Children have a sense of self-esteem comparable in strength to that of adults by the time they are five, researchers say. They found that the sense of self began earlier than previously thought. Because self-esteem tends to remain relatively stable across one's lifespan, the study suggests that this important personality trait is already in place before children begin kindergarten.

'Our work provides the earliest glimpse to date of how preschoolers sense their selves,' said lead author Dario Cvencek of the University of Washington. 'We found that as young as 5 years of age self-esteem is established strongly enough to be measured,' said Cvencek, 'and we can measure it using sensitive techniques.'

The new findings, published in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, used a newly developed test to assess implicit self-esteem in more than 200 5-year-old children - the youngest age yet to be measured. 'Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves.

'Our findings suggest that self-esteem, feeling good or bad about yourself, is fundamental,' said co-author, Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of I-LABS. 'It is a social mindset children bring to school with them, not something they develop in school.' Meltzoff continued: 'What aspects of parent-child interaction promote and nurture preschool self-esteem? That's the essential question.'We hope we can find out by studying even younger children.'

Until now no measurement tool has been able to detect self-esteem in preschool-aged children. This is because existing self-esteem tests require the cognitive or verbal sophistication to talk about a concept like 'self' when asked probing questions by adult experimenters.

'Preschoolers can give verbal reports of what they're good at as long as it is about a narrow, concrete skill, such as 'I'm good at running' or 'I'm good with letters,' but they have difficulties providing reliable verbal answers to questions about whether they are a good or bad person,' Cvencek said. To try a different approach, Cvencek, Meltzoff and co-author Anthony Greenwald created a self-esteem task for preschoolers. Called the Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT), it measures how strongly children feel positively about themselves.

The task for adults works by measuring how quickly people respond to words in different categories.  Taken together, the findings show that self-esteem is not only unexpectedly strong in children this young, but is also systematically related to other fundamental parts of children's personality, such as in-group preferences and gender identity.

'Self-esteem appears to play a critical role in how children form various social identities. Our findings underscore the importance of the first five years as a foundation for life,' Cvencek said.

The researchers are following up with the children in the study to examine whether self-esteem measured in preschool can predict outcomes later in childhood, such as health and success in school. They are also interested in the malleability of children's self-esteem and how it changes with experience.

What do you think?

** Note: I have disabled the commenting feature on my blog engine thanks to all the spammers who happily spam my blog every day. If you wish to ask me any questions, you can find me at my Facebook page (I'm there almost everyday) or just drop me an email if you wish to maintain some anonymity.