Christmas Party

Last Saturday, our whole family trooped to college barkada apple’s place for our annual Christmas party. Bea was of course, very excited. She met with her usual playmates. She was also extra happy because this year she got to play ate Bea to little Gaby. =) Since she is still difficult to feed, we just gave her milk and her yaya got her share of jollibee chicken joy.

When it was gift-giving time, Bea could barely contain her joy. Gift! Gift! She kept on saying. She was so happy to receive many gifts for titas and titos. I allowed her to open only one gift, so that she won’t feel left out with the other kids, the rest I put under the tree at home to be opened on Christmas day. To my surprise, she’s ok with it. =)

 

insurance for the little girl

Recently, FIL died, and this got hubby and I talking about death. Us, Filipinos, often cringe when we talk about death. We rather not talk about it because we feel it is a morbid topic, too terrible to even discuss. Memorial plans and life insurance plans are not to be purchased, because it is like inviting death to our doors. It is better to invest in retirement plans, this way you can still enjoy the fruits of your investment.

Our family can testify first hand, how helpful it was for us that our parents had memorial plans. When faced with tragedy, you are often confused and disoriented. You are too consumed by grief to even bother with the financial nitty-gritty. Many people don’t know, dying is very expensive, and it can cause so much financial strain on the family left behind. I experienced this when my mom died, hubby just experienced this when his dad died.

Although we both have our life insurance plans, I got the cheapest ones. I got them when we were in our early 20’s when death was such a remote possibility. Now, hubby is thinking of getting another one. I warned him that our budget just can’t allow it, but he is persistent. He is thinking about the little one’s future. 

Oh well. I guess a personal tragedy can really cause a reality check.

I barely escaped disaster!

Yep, that I did! And I am very thankful for it. What disaster is this? Hmmm. My laptop conked out on me! As in! I was just upload some of little one’s pics on her friendster when the laptop turned itself off. Apparently, the plug was not properly attached to the socket, so the laptop had no more power. Ok, fine. This has happened to me a dozen of times! I just rebooted the laptop, but it won’t boot. It just kept of restarting. It was really frustrating. I tried everything. I tried booting on safe mode, using the windows installer CD, everything I can think of… to no avail!

Good thing thought that when my sister had someone fix her pc, she also asked the guy to look into my laptop. The tech guy that proceeded to put a partition in my hard drive, that way he said, should my OS crash, my files will still be intact (whew).

After attempting to reboot gazillions of times, I tried to format my drive c, as a last act of desperation. Bye bye files. Bye bye programs. Good thing though that I was able to back some of my files while I was on vacation. And as if fate is playing a joke on me, the formatting just won’t go through. It reaches up to 56% then hangs. Grrr!

I wanted to blog about Manny Pacquiao’s win, but couldn’t, I wanted to express my frustration that Channel 2 was showing Judy Ann Santos’ movie KKK part 2 the same time Channel 7 was showing the boxing match. I would’ve loved to watch Juday’s movie since I watched the 1^st installment and just loved it. But I just couldn’t. I was so sad. Good thing hubby is ever sensitive about my feelings. Seeing how frustrated I was, he volunteered to drive me to SM megamall to have my laptop fixed.

I was still apprehensive though since I didn’t have any money to pay for any parts that may need to be replaced. I was also hoping against hope that the labor charges won’t be so steep. The heavens heard my prayer since as it turned out, I didn’t have to pay for anything! Labor was free, and since the problem was not in the hardware, they didn’t need to replace anything! The problem was with my OS and the installation process. The laptop must’ve been tired from all that rebooting. It got the much needed rest while we were traveling to the mall. When we tried to install the software, it ran beautifully.  Haaay (sigh of relief)

So last night, I was faced with the tedious task of installing the programs and drivers all over again. I wasn’t completely done yet, but at least I was able to try the wifi connection and was able to log on the internet. That’s enough for now. But of course, photoshop will have to be next, for my scrap stuff. =)

Whew…whew…and whew… a thousand times over!

 

are you afraid of the...cold?

My little bea is a brave little soul. She has very little concept of danger or of other scary things. Although last Halloween, she learned that there are certain things that people are scared of…thanks to her yaya. One example is the movie Kulam, by Judy Ann Santos. Since her yaya gets scared whenever she looks at the dvd, bea learned to be scared too. Then when her ninang brought home a brochure from toy kingdom showcasing different Halloween goodies, she was particularly scared of the bloody hand. And so understandably, she was also scared when the commercial for the selecta family pack featuring Zoren and Carmina’s family, it featured a mutilated hand.

She did not get that from mommy because I love horror movies, and I love getting scared. Probably from daddy’s side of the family…shhh. Don’t tell him. Hehehe.

One fear she did get from me though, is her fear of cold water. Hehehe. We can’t take our baths without boiling some water to mix with the tap water. When she feels her water is too cold for comfort, she screams her heart out. She is just not happy when she is not warm enough. Hubby loves the hot water for its therapeutic and relaxing effect on the body. Which is why we opted to celebrate my birthday last weekend by going to Laguna and soaking ourselves silly in its famed hot springs. Needless to say, the little one simply loved it…and so did we!