Toilet training is really important for our baby, but we found out that toilet training is really difficult to do. Not because our baby didn’t want to, but because we’re tired to clean up after they peed on the floor or on the bed (mostly on the bed, since it will leave a sign, it will make our bed wet and sometimes smells bad! We have to change the bed sheet as well)

“Oh my…. I just clean up the floor, why you didn’t tell me if you want to pee?”

Moreover, we have to change the pants over and over again, leaving a bunch of dirty clothes and dirty bed sheet at the end of the day. Trust me, I’m so tired to do the laundry when I started toilet training since Claire can pee 4-5 times on the floor or on the bed, or everywhere. I decided to use diapers again for several months.

Then I read something on the news that sometimes, diapers contain a dangerous material that will cause a disease for baby’s vital area. I have no idea wether it’s true or not, since I got different opinion from different doctor. I decided not to use diapers anymore and use it only for sleeping time.

Then I found something that made Claire want to tell me if she wants to pee. I asked her to wipe the floor if she peed on the floor without telling me. After several times of doing it, Claire can make it! She told me in advance! Quite working, don’t you think so? I know that it seems ro mean, but I gave her the explanation that she has to tell me if she wants to pee. If she didn’t tell me, that what will happen. So she understand and accept it ( she cried sometimes… )

So in the morning till afternoon, it’s not a big problem, but when sleeping, I tried several times not using diaper, but Claire always pee on the bed.

The solution: take her around 12 am to the toilet, she peed and I save the day! Up to now, she never peed on the bed while sleeping. She can manage to pee in the morning!

So, take courage. I know it’s tiring, but it will be a great advanture with your little one!

Have you seen my Childhood?
I’m searching for the world that I come from
‘Cause I’ve been looking around
In the lost and found of my heart…
No one understands me

They view it as such strange eccentricities…
‘Cause I keep kidding around
Like a child, but pardon me…

People say I’m not okay
‘Cause I love such elementary things…
It’s been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood
I’ve never known…

Have you seen my Childhood?
I’m searching for that wonder in my youth
Like pirates in adventurous dreams,
Of conquest and kings on the throne…

Before you judge me, try hard to love me,
Look within your heart then ask,
Have you seen my Childhood?

People say I’m strange that way
‘Cause I love such elementary things,
It’s been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood I’ve never known…

Have you seen my Childhood?
I’m searching for that wonder in my youth
Like fantastical stories to share
The dreams I would dare, watch me fly…

Before you judge me, try hard to love me.
The painful youth I’ve had

Have you seen my Childhood…

(more…)

I believe you know the “F” icon for Facebook, or “Y” for Yahoo, “G” for Google, etc. When you see those icons, I believe you can remember the meaning of those icons instantly, right?

Now, check out my icon on the left hand side of the address bar, or on your tab, I got “$” as my icon. The reasons are:

1. Having a baby is an investment, one of my friend said so. Why, because your baby will grow up and will take care of you when you’re getting old, so the more you give time, attention, love, good nutrition, education, etc, it means you invest alot for your future. Is that making any sense?
2. To have a brainy baby, it means we have to spend money for them, so in this web, I would like to share about how to manage our financial condition, I would like to share about earning more from our blog, a financial revolution.
3. A great blog will generate more dollar to our pocket.

With that icon, I hope you can always remember my web. So, how to make that attractive icon?

Let me tell you how!  (more…)

Some parents raised their hands when they where asked, “Who said that drawing is not important for children?” Well, what is your answer? Did you plan to raise your hand as well?

Probably some of you will think the same and force our children to learn math and science instead of drawing or playing  music, but the truth is drawing and playing music is really important for children’s right brain stimulation.

To be clever, children MUST have a balance brain, not only left brain, but also right brain. Left brain fungtioned  to control the scientific, analitical, rational and logical thing such as reading, language, math, etc, while right brain fungtioned to control about everything related to art, flexibilty and creativity. If we stimulate left brain more than right brain, children will be less creative in problem solving thing, but if we stimulate right brain more than left brain, it will be difficult to put dicipline on them and they will be more flexible in everything. That’s why we have to stimulate both brain.

(more…)

Sometimes we found that our blog reader only visit our blog for one time and never come back again. Even though people love to read blogs, they will not read all of our posts. They want to read very specific topics in our blog and if they couldn’t find it, they will click the back button and try to find other related posts from the Search Engine result. But how can we find out what they really want in our blog? If we ask them some questions, it will annoy them. Try this for example, “What do you want to find in this blog?” Will  you answer this question? But if not, we couldn’t find out what they want to find.

To some of you, probably this is not a big problem, but for those of us who use blog as a mean to earn money, it will affect our traffic alot. If we loose our trafic, our income also will decrease. So, how to overcome this problem?

We have to know what our reader want in our blog and write down great post about it!

Ok, that’s great, but how to find out what our readers want?

(more…)

Probably most of us know about Peter Pan story, a young man who stays young and live in Neverland. My little baby loves to see Tinker Bell the Fairy in that story and I think most of children will choose to live in a place like Neverland, a place where they can play and find happiness as a child.

When I heard about Neverland for the first time when Michael Jackson bought that ranch, I didn’t really know what it was. I thought  that it was a name for the ranch but I realized it when I read the story of Peter Pan 2 years ago for my baby. That’s my ‘AHA’ moment.

Then, when Michael Jackson died, I heard so many story about how Michael loved to play just like a child, how he wanted to stay young like Peter Pan, and how he built the place to fulfill his dream as a child.

Well, it’s really sad to remember about Michael’s life, that even though he had everything in life, successful career, money, power, children, but there was something missing in his life,… his childhood. He didn’t have enough time to play with other children when he was little, he felt lonely because he had no friend to play with. 

Back to my life here, sometimes I was so mean to my little girl. She always ask me wheter she can play with her friend or not, but at the first time, my answers were “NO” because I thought playing with me is enough for her. Then I realized how happy she was when she played with her friend, playing soccer, ballon, bicycle, or just hanging around doing nothing.

Now, thinking about Michael’s story, I always remember that no matter what life we wanted our child to be, I will always give time for my baby to play with her friends. I don’t want her to end up in sorrow, thinking about her missing childhood. So parents, what do you think about this?

Have you ever heard about ping in a blog? Probably some of you will said, “What is that?”

When I heard about this for the first time, I was totally lost, since ping  is also my dad’s name! What a coincidence, right?

Well to make it simple, in blog, ping is the most important way to tell every body that we added a new post in our blog. If you write something on your blog, of course you want everybody to read it, right?  ”Hei,… I got new stuff here… ” something like that. Whenever a blog pings, our blog will be indexed by search engines, so that it will bring traffic to our blog from many sources.

So, ping is an important thing for our blog, right?

But ping also need a ping optimizer for our WordPress blog. Why? Because in default, WordPress pings whenever you post a new topic in your blog, eventhough we only edited our post or updated an existing post! That is really dangerous because your blog can be banned because of excessive pinging.

In order to optimize the work of the ping, we need this special ping optimizer.

1. Download the file here.

2. After you download the file, unzip it using Winzip. Remember to put it in one folder for plugin so that you can find it easily. If you don’t have the Winzip program, you can download it here.  

3. Using FileZilla, upload the plugin to your WordPress blog. Double click public_html on the upper right hand side of the windows and you will see wp-content. Double click it and you will find plugins.  Now find the unzipped file on the lower left hand side of the FileZilla, drag the file and drop it on the lower right hand side of the windows.

4. After the file was transferred, go to your WordPress blog and go to Dashboard.

5. Click Plugins and you will see the new plugin on the buttom side. Click activate.

6. You can check the setting of Ping Optimizer under Setting. You can add URIs to Ping and also the Ping Log at the bottom of your Ping Optimizer setting. You can find out that you only ping 1 time, which is very safe for your blog. Isn’t it amazing??

Why don’t you try it and let me know if you got something to ask….

Have you ever seen a great stripe ad on one web site and looking for the best way to making it yourselves? If you haven’t seen any of it, check the yellow red thing on the top of my blog. Do you want to make money by putting that kind of stripe ad on your WordPress blog?

I’ve seen one and thought to myself that I should make a stripe ad as well for my blog because:

1. You can write anything on that space and you can link it to any web page you want.

2. You can draw more attention to your reader about what happened in your blog, a news, a contest, pool or anything else.

3. You can customize the size, the font, the color and how many stipe ads you want to put.

4.  But the best thing is you can get more money by using it as an affiliate link. If your reader interested to buy,  you can get commision out of it.

What do you think about that kind of stripe Ad? Interesting, right?

But since I have limited time, it is really difficult to make a great stripe ad, moreover I don’t have any programming background.

One day, I found a great Stripe ad plugin for Wordpress blog that is really easy to use!

1. Download the plugin here.

2. After you download the file, unzip it using Winzip. Remember to put it in one folder for plugin so that you can find it easily. If you don’t have the Winzip program, you can download it here.  

3. Using FileZilla, upload the plugin to your WordPress blog. Double click public_html on the upper right hand side of the windows and you will see wp-content. Double click it and you will find plugins.  Now find the unzipped file on the lower left hand side of the FileZilla, drag the file and drop it on the lower right hand side of the windows.

4. After the file was transferred, go to your WordPress blog and go to Dashboard.

5. Click Plugins and you will see the new plugin on the buttom side. Click activate.

6. When you click it for the first time, you have to activate it by giving your name and your email address. They will send the activation to your email address.

7. After you received the email, activate it and you can use your Stripe Ad right away.

It’s really easy, right?

Have a problem with my explanation? Let me know about this! Ok,..

In this unperfect world, we always want to have the best in everything, we want to be the best in everything, but I think that is impossible. Just like other parents, we also want to have the good looking boy, we want to have the cute charming girl, but when the reality is not the same, we put on label to our children based on their appearance to express our dissatisfaction. But one thing you need to remember that this is a bullying.

“Hey you, big nose!”

“Ow, you fatty cow”

We didn’t realize that by the time we put on label like that, it will be like a destructive weapon that can explode in the future. Our children will not have a good self-confidence, they will think that other people also have the same opinion just like you, their parents.

As they grow up, they will think to themselves, “I have to change my appearance, so that my parents and other people will not make fun of me anymore. ” Well that’s the positive way, but there is a possibility that our children can take the negative way, “I’m no body, I’m overweight, I don’t have a good looking face, I’ll just stay here, at home so that no one can make fun of me. ” The worst thing is they can kill themselves to end the sorrow.

If our children take the positive way, that’s good. But if they took the negative way, it will be very difficult for them to change their way of thinking about themselves. I found some children with this kind of behavior and it is very difficult to speak with them because they always refer to what their parents said when they were young.

Michael Jackson also had this kind of problem, I think. I read in several articles that his father called him with “Big nose”. This might be funny if we do that to our children, but as I said before, we can count this as a bullying. Michael succeed to change his nose even thought it cost him thousand  of dollars, but how about other children out there who face this kind of problem and decided to end their life?

Still remembering Michael, I really want to share about this article from wikipedia.

“Michael Jackson first spoke openly about his childhood abuse in a 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey. He said that during his childhood he often cried from loneliness and would sometimes start to vomit upon seeing his father.^{[10][11][12][13]} In Jackson’s other high profile interview, Living with Michael Jackson (2003), the singer covered his face with his hand and began crying when talking about his childhood abuse.^[9] Jackson recalled that Joseph sat in a chair with a belt in his hand as he and his siblings rehearsed and that “if you didn’t do it the right way, he would tear you up, really get you”.

I think most of us, as parents, want to give the best for our children, we want to see our children has a bright future, we want them to be a successful person, we want them to have a better economic condition, we want them to have a high social status so that we put a really high expectation for them, we discipline for our children in a really high level. On the other side, as a young children, they will not understand the reason of our behavior, why they need to have that kind of discipline while other kid can play, sleep, do anything they want without any fear. Why they have to receive such a discipline?

There is a missing link here.

My mom, even though she never beat me with a belt, she has a really high expectation from me. Everytime she get mad at me, she will explain the reason, she will make me understand why she need to do that and now, even though I still can remember her voice, her slap on my butt, but I can understand fully why she did that to me, only because she loves me and because she wanted me to have a bright future.

That’s the missing link…

If you want to put a discipline to your children, I think you really have to consider Michael’s case as a reminder, never abuse a child if you want to put discipline on them. If you really want to discipline them, please give some explanation about that, so that they will understand the reason and they will not put this hard feeling in their heart. Another way is to give reward not a punishment.

Everybody loves to receive reward, including your children. Why don’t you give a reward instead of punishment if you want them to do something for their future. If you still want a punishment, you might think about a “brainy punishment”  instead of slapping their face or using a belt to spank their butt.

What do you think about this?