Skye’s been having this on-and-off cough since round about June this year. I’ve taken her to our family doctor a few times. The cough would go away for a while, then come back again.

Although our doctor doesn’t make it a habit to dish out antibiotics, I still didn’t like the idea of her taking so much medication on a regular basis.

So I bought her some cod liver oil ‘plus’. The ‘plus’ version comes with Vitamin D and is supposedly more potent than the regular version. After taking one capsule a day for a month or so, her cough was still coming around on and off.

That’s when I decided to double her intake. The instructions were one or two capsules a day. So I thought why not go for the max and see what happens.

It’s working! She’s been on double dosage for more than a month now and her cough is gone. She herself can feel the difference. I just bought her a new bottle last night.

If you liked this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed for more hip parenting posts. Oh and do leave me a comment, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I’ve seen a mother at Skye’s school who drives a pickup truck to, what else, pick up her kids from school. She lets her kids swing their backpacks into the open back of the truck and climb in.

Of course, it’s very dangerous for them to ride on the back like that without even a back rack for support.

They’re available online from BuyAutoTruckAccessories.com which carries a wide range of quality truck accessories at reasonable prices.

But still I can’t help but think the open back of the truck should be for goods, not kids. Even if it’s a short ride home, I wouldn’t allow my kids to do that.

Thank goodness for the weekend. I’m bumped, seriously! We’ve hardly spent any time at home dashing from one end of town to another.

Like they say, one too many lunch and dinner appointments is bad for you :lol: though I have to say the kids enjoy the good food.

I’m starting to feel fat from all this eating. I may just declare next week to be Workout Week like I did last school holidays. At least that helped us all slim down :wink: .

There’s been quite a lot of talk lately about teachers using the cane on their students for forgetting to bring their books or doing their homework.

This and the fact that the Chinese school system allows very little room for creativity are two reasons why we didn’t send our kids to Chinese school. We almost did because of pressure from ‘well-meaning’ relatives and friends.

But Hubz and I, who don’t subscribe to the herd mentality, decided otherwise and I must say, I’m glad we did. After all, we know ourselves and our kids best so we base our decision on what we think is best for us, not what everyone else thinks is best.

I love weddings. They’re so exciting to plan that I often wonder why young people these days prefer to outsource theirs to those all-in-one wedding houses.

Granted it’s a lot of hard work and time to organize such a big event but it’s also a great test of how well the couple can work together as a team.

I think you stand to save a lot from organizing it yourself too. You can just get a few quotes from hotels for their wedding packages and order bulk flowers from FiftyFlowers.com at great discounts.

In fact, you can order practically everything else online as well these days. I find they often have more variety and you can probably get better discounts too. Best of all, I think it’s the teamwork.

The way I see it, there’s not harm trying to make a few bucks off the internet during your free time. There’s nothing to lose and so much to gain from having some loose change to spend rewarding yourself once in a while.

Running an online store is much easier and cheaper than setting up a physical store. For one thing, you can leave it to run without having to man your store like you would if you had a brick and mortar business. That’s for sure.

In fact, Ashop Commerce, an award-winning shopping cart software lets you start your own online store easily and quickly. This software is web-based so there are no downloads, upgrades or complicated setups to worry about.

You can always sign up for their free 10-day trial offer for a chance to see for yourself how the entire ecommerce system comes together. If you need help with your store design, well, you’ll be happy to know that comes free with your purchase of Ashop Commerce.

We started Steev in kindy when he was five thinking it was the place where he could go to learn some social skills. Being first time parents then, we just went with our gut feeling that five was a good age.

But Steev quickly became bored with the repetitive nature of kindy learning where he had to keep repeating the alphabets, nursery rhymes and stories he’d already heard before.

He started walking around the classroom. He was a quiet little guy so he really wasn’t disturbing anyone. He just needed something new and different to fuel his quick learning mind.

His teachers knew him too well and would let him wander around to the bookshelf behind the class to quietly read a book. Sometimes he’d just look out the window deriving some strange inspiration from there, I suppose .

When it came Raine’s and Skye’s turn at kindy, we only enrolled them when they were six. We’d learnt our lesson with Steev, so we decided one year of kindy is enough even though our well-meaning friends and relatives tried to convince us otherwise.

Everyone we knew was sending their kids to kindy at 4 or 5 years of age. So they were convinced our kids would be missing out a lot by starting school so late.

How old were your kids when they first started school?

Parenting, fun though it may be, can really take a lot out of you. Yet it’s rare that we have the luxury of taking a break, at least not when the kids are still young.

It’s sometimes pretty hard for mothers to just take off and go on a vacation without a guilty or nagging thought because no matter what, their first thought is always about their kids.

It would be nice though if a group of us could just get together and book ourselves some Villas in Orlando where we can just forget about our jobs as moms for a while.

Think Florida offers online bookings of condos, private pool homes and town houses with promises of a wide range of activities to suit anyone’s fancy. Sounds like the perfect mom’s getaway, don’t you think?

It’s never easy when old folks lose the ability to care for themselves and become increasingly dependent on others. I have relatives who are ever eager to send off the old folks to nursing homes even when it is quite clear that they are financially able to hire someone to care for them at home.

Culturally I think we’ve become much less filial and more willing to push the older folks out of the way the minute they are no longer of any use to us. At least, this is what my sister-in-law is notorious for.

I’m not really in favor of sending old folks to a nursing home unless there is really no other choice and it is clear that they will receive better care and attention there and will enjoy the company of others their age.

But even before we do, we should check out the resources on Better Caring to get an idea of what sort of services are provided and what sort of psychological impact being put in a home will have on the aged.

During the last school holidays, I declared that one week to be Exercise Week. I’ve tried various ways to get the kids to exercise but without much success. So I had to come up with something more exciting, you know, like a challenge.

Teens love a good challenge most of the time though it’s sometimes hard to tell when that is, because they can be so moody.

But surprisingly my Exercise Week turned out to be somewhat of a success. We managed to work up a sweat at the gym for four out of the five weekdays. I consider that to be good *pats self on back*.

During the few weeks that Steev was having his exams, we all slimmed down due to various factors - exam blues, stress, eating out less and rushing around more.

But since the last day of the exams, we’ve shifted into school holiday gear - shopping, eating, playing computer games, sleeping late and waking up late and generally being lazy. So those extra pounds are coming back .

If your kids are turning a little pudgy too due to the school holidays, you might want to inspire them to do some exercise by declaring your own Exercise Week where you and them will engage in one physical exercise activity a day for a week.

My suggestion is not to be too ambitious. Many of our city kids are adverse to exercise and are hard to drag away from their online life. So see how you do with a week’s worth of exercise first .