I'm a full-time mummy

Yeap... we just had durians (pronounced as "do-ree-aunt") yesterday!! It was yummylicious! A close friend of ours came over in the afternoon and spent the evening at our house, their daughter is about 2 months+ older than Ben so they were having a blast playing in Ben's playroom. Then we went out for dinner and stopped over to buy back some durians to eat at home.

This is the durian stall we went to... They even have their own website! Coolness!

Oh yeah, before I forget, noticed that new watermark on the picture above? What do you think of it? Also a creation of moi.. hahaha... I wanted it to look like it has been stamped the way they do when they sent mails and stuff but I guess this will do...

So anyway before I distract myself further from the topic of durians, we ordered 2 types of durians... We got one of the staff there to choose the best ones and he went ahead and cut open the durians with his big knife...

And then he showed us the contents:

Look at the glorious yellowing fleshy durians in there! The staff then asked us to take one and tried just to be sure it's the best, so hubby wasted no time and proceeded to dunk in his hand and grabbed one and tried. Look at the picture below... look at Ben's pitiful face... OK, maybe he doesn't look pitiful but he was gazing intently at the durian (by which all that was left in daddy's hand was the seed)

The rest of the durians were swiftly cut open and packed into a container for us to bring back home to eat. Sorry for the picture color, it was taken under yellow warm light, and definitely doesn't do the justice of those glorious and yummylicious durians... Ben loves eating it though we don't give him a lot, just tiny bits for him to try the new taste

So anyway, you can read more about durians from Wikipedia at this link. How about you? Have you tried durians before?

... is what my blog would say! My blog has finally found its own home!

After the process of acquiring my own domain (http://www.imafulltimemummy.com/) since 11th June 2010, I have immediately proceeded to design my new blog layout and settings. There are tons of things to take care of, such as:

* Hosting - where should I host my own blog domain now? Wordpress? Etc?

* Blog Design - how do I want my blog to look like now? Do I use back the previous design or do from scratch?

* Blog Identity (header/banner, buttons, signatures, gravatar etc) - depends on my blog design... if I use back my blogspot design, then everything pretty much remains the same...

* Migration of data - what about my almost 350 posts since I started blogging in June last year? Not to mention over 2000+ comments received on my blog? Do I leave it in blogspot or I move it over to my new domain?

* Activities - What about my current blogging activities in http://imafulltimemummy.blogspot.com/?

* Followers - What about my current followers? How do I migrate them over?

Well, anyway, after much considerations and some wishy-washy-indecisive-do and redo process, I have decided to:

* Hosting - go for something other than Wordpress.. I am not a fan of Wordpress actually...

* Blog Design - refer to one of the template from BlogEngine (*thanks to Magnus Jepson for his template!) and fine tune it myself based on my own liking... The reason why I decided NOT to use back my previous template in http://imafulltimemummy.blogspot.com/ is because of my blog identity. I want it to be unique and hence decided to not reuse the template in my blogspot theme.

* Blog Identity (header/banner, buttons, signatures, gravatar etc) - Since I decided to do my own blog design, everything has to be designed and customised from scratch! Blog headers, all the sidebar titles, my new blog signature, gravatar, new blog buttons, new blog meme etc... Please excuse the simple design as I do not have any experience in graphic designs and I do all this using Microsoft Paint & Powerpoint softwares but I do love it myself so I guess you guys have to just bear with the ugliness of them OK?

* Migration of data - As much as it saddens me to leave everything as it is in my old blogspot blog, I made this decision mainly because I want to start everything fresh... I mean, I finally have my OWN BLOG DOMAIN! So I decided to leave all the old posts and comments as it is (even though I did initially migrated all of them over to BlogEngine for my testing in this new domain). Oh, another reason is most of the images in my http://imafulltimemummy.blogspot.com/ are watermarked as http://imafulltimemummy.blogspot.com/. "Bad move", says my husband... Yeap... how would I know I would one day decided to have my own blog domain and be super strict and possesive with my own images??!!!

* Activities - As for current blogging activities in http://imafulltimemummy.blogspot.com/, I have to temporarily reduce and even stop posting some new stuff in the blog (need to keep those new ideas in my new blog ehem ehem!) and just be contented with blog hopping while I rushed up the development of this my own blog domain. I also have a giveaway running in my blogspot which will ends on 30th June 2010, so I figured it'd be best if I announce the winner here later ...

* Followers - As for moving over my followers, I did some searching on the Net and found some tutorials to guide me along, but as of now, I'm still tinkering around as not very good in web scripting for this... thank God hubby managed to set up the Google Friend Connect widget for me!

Of course, I do get worried with things like:

• Will my own blog domain be as awesome as my older blog in http://imafulltimemummy.blogspot.com/?
• Do the images for my own blog domain looks nice?  (You have NO idea how much time I spent designing and redo, screen capture, cut and paste, upload and delete all those images you see in this blog now!) Oh well, to save myself from spending $$$ in getting a web designer or purchasing those ready made or customised blog templates and images on the Net, I will not regret this decision! 
  
• Will my own blog domain be getting back its regular bloggy friends and visitors or am I going to be the only one reading my own blog domain now?

Oh well, now all that is history... I've gotta move forward.

Today is a brand new day for me... and definitely for my blog.

Finally I don't have to be in fear of 'squatting' over blogspot (free thing doesn't mean its good... I'll explain more on this later...)

I've got to get down to doing some product reviews which are waiting for me for a while now and also posting some new developments on Ben... Till then, thank you for coming here and I really hope I will see you back here again!

p.s: If you don't mind, could you leave me your feedback about this blog? Anything that comes on your mind when you are here... like the design, structure and layout, the sidebar widgets, fonts, anything... Thanks, really appreciate it!