I read on CNN yesterday about how kids as young as 6 years of age are being made to walk on their hands in China, all as part of their early training for future Olympics.

Watching the video of that poor little girl crying as she was put through rigorous, almost abusive acrobatic routines turned my heart to stone. The tears streaming from her eyes made me cry inside.

Her father says she doesn’t like the training (are you kiddin’ me?) but that they’re putting her through the grueling routines in the hopes she will be good enough to be in the Olympics, so she’ll have a brighter future? Gah! Yeah but at what cost to her mentally and physically?

I don’t care how much fame, fortune or glory they hope to get out if pushing their little girl that hard, but what they’re doing is inhumane.

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Two of my gym buddies have started working out under a personal trainer. Wow, I thought personal trainers were only for celebs . But it’s pretty neat that they can afford one.

It seems he drives them pretty hard too. I guess he has to if he wants visible results quick. I can’t wait to see how they turn out.

The trainer has asked if I’m interested in training under him. Nah, I told him, I’m not sure a structured approach will work well for me at all.

I’m happy to plog along at my own pace and I pretty much know what I’m doing. I’m not saying I know everything but enough to see that my workouts have been effective.

Most importantly, I’m very pleased with the shape I’m in. At this point, I don’t need someone to crack the whip on me and turn me into a reed. But if I go to any more of those wedding dinners, I just might .

We’ve been invited to a wedding at the end of this year. The daughter of DH’s cousin will be getting married and we’ve been told six months ahead so we can keep the date free. See how important we are .

Well, I’m just happy this gives me time to swing my gym workouts into high gear. Quite frankly, I’m pretty happy with the shape I’m in right now. But knowing about the wedding this early means I have no excuses not to work those abs to perfection.

I spoke with the gym trainer the other day and asked if he had super-effective, super-quick abs workouts for me. Maybe there’s a secret formula I don’t know about.

He offered to be my personal trainer. He says every celeb has one to push them to body beautiful. Wow! Okay, okay, just gimme a minute to come down from Cloud Nine.

Um, on second thought, I’m no celeb. I can sing all of the Backstreet Boys songs in the bathroom. Wait a minute. That’s it! I look like a celeb but didn’t know it? Nah, surely he’s got me confused with JLo or Beyonce or someone with a famous butt, muacks *rolling on the floor laughing*.

I was passing by a signboard for Tumbletots the other day and it immediately brought to mind the funny experience we had signing Steev up for it. Our friends signed up their daughter, also aged around 18 months at the time.

Of course, at the time, being first-time parents, we were excited about the prospect of introducing our kids to a new set of motor skills, shared play and social skills. Each week, we looked forward to bringing our kids there.

Within a month, it became quite clear that while our friend’s daughter was enjoying herself and having a ball with the singing, dancing and climbing activities, Steev wasn’t the least bit interested. In fact, I ended up doing all the activities while Steev sat there and amused himself with watching us make fools of ourselves!

Okay, so that’s it! We decided to call it quits and left our friends and their daughter to enjoy themselves. Clearly not all programs are suited to all kids and it’s hard to tell unless you try it out.

Our friend’s daughter enjoyed it tremendously and they couldn’t understand why Steev wasn’t interested at all. Each child is different and even at a very young age, many already exhibit their preferences.

Practically everyone I talk to these days is on a diet. The thing though is that dieting alone isn’t enough as I always try to tell people. If you want to lose weight quickly and permanently, you need to take a multi-pronged approach.

In fact, before you even begin to get carried away with so-called quick weight loss methods (which may or may not work), it’s best to arm yourself with information on how you should go about it correctly.

A good place to start would be the Planet Fat Loss site which has a wealth of information about everything that has to do with weight loss including fitness, diet and nutrition, and even product reviews to help you decide on what’s most likely to work for you.

Skye went for a cross-country run organized by the school last Friday. A fine day it was for cross-country. It was probably the hottest day in the year and frankly, if I’d had my say, kids shouldn’t be out there running in the sun.

But well, the show must go on, like they say. The kids had been gearing up for it for weeks. So off they went, caps, sunblock and bottles of water. They were back at school by midday, flushed, exhausted but happy.

By sundown that day, Skye was running a temperature. Yep, that was the start of our hot, feverish weekend.

Don’t you just hate it when you’ve been working out regularly but not seeing any significant improvements at all the wrong parts of your body? That’s what’s happening with me over the past few months.

I’m at my ideal weight and it’s been stable like forever so that’s good. So I’m not trying to lose weight.

It’s just that I feel like I’m in a workout rut. I want to start seeing results again especially to the areas where I hope no one will notice .

I’ve stopped my line dancing class for now and I’m doing the salsa at home. I’ve never been good with this willpower thingey so I do have to live with the guilt of not doing it as regularly as I should.

But I’m not going to beat myself up over it. I’m happy I’m ramping up my workouts, trying new routines and working longer hours at the gym.

I’m also eating a lot more meals and guzzling more liquids. Because of my workouts, I’m feeling hungry more often so I’m doing like 5 meals a day. I don’t control my diet and I eat what I want, no worries.

I go to bed reasonably tired and looking forward to the next day’s workout. So I guess I’m on the right track and I’m sticking with it. How about you?

With Skye, my youngest, turning twelve this year, I guess that makes 3 sets of raging hormones in this household !

It’s hard to believe my babies are all teens now. A mighty proud mama here!

I’m going to need lots of stamina to keep up, keep going and stay one step ahead. Yikes. Think I should add a couple more hours to my weekly workouts?

I’m thinking salsa and I’ve already started with a half-hour of shaking to salsa music today. It’s really fun and if I last out the week and succeed in making a routine of it, I might sign up for a class, you reckon :wink: ?

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.

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 .