Mommy Pehpot, Author at Mommy Pehpot

Hassle Free Food Preparation

I’m a mother of four kids and I am still breastfeeding my youngest. I have a husband who also demands my attention and I had to feed them all. I don’t have a helper.. and I maintain more than 10 blogs.. of course my sister is here and she really is a big help to me.. but do you know how I manage to be a mult- faceted mom? Hassle Free Food Preparation! (and a microwave oven)

Food preparation for a large family can be time consuming.. if you will not manage it well, half of your day will be spent preparing food, with my technique, everyday food preparation only takes 5-10 minutes. No Sweat!

No, I don’t rely on fastfood and carinderia.. and also not on instant ulam, I still cook our food. My secret is to devote one a week in food preparation. Usually we go to the market on Saturday mornings then the whole Saturday is devoted cooking dishes. After each dish is done, I let it cool and it goes straight to our freezer. I only do that on meat dishes though, as with veggies, it’s tasted different when you it is placed on that freeze. What I do is blanch the veggies then put it in the freezer and defrost it when I need it.

This has been my technique for more than a year already and so far it has been very helpful to me. Just imagine, for a week, you will have to cook 5 dishes that needs garlic and onion, on a daily basis, for a week, you will have to peel and cut (and cry) garlic and onion, where in if you will apply my technique of cooking just once a week, you were able to save 4 peeling and cutting time.

The technique is very useful to moms who have no time cook on a daily basis. Another reason why I devised this technique is to preserve the freshness of the produce that we buy specially the veggies (hence the blanching) since we usually do our shopping every two weeks or every week.

When it’s to time to eat, we just put the food on the microwave and voila!

How to Treat Swollen Lips and Some Home Remedies for Swollen Lips

Everything seems fine, then all of a sudden there’s an itch on your lips and before you see it, your lips is as a big as a tomato. Swollen Lips. There are many causes of swollen lips and the most common swollen lips cause is allergies, next is skin bite.

When a person experience lip swelling, here are some of the things that they should remember and ask themselves:

when did the swelling start?
what are you doing before the swelling starts?
have you taken any medicine 2-3 hours before swelling?
did you eat any food prior to swelling?

It is very important to learn the cause of swelling so that proper medicine can be administer.

As soon as you notice swollen lips, the best home remedy is to apply ice pack on the swollen area. It will help in numbing the area so as you wouldn’t feel any discomfort and itchiness. Apply it every 30 minutes for 3-5 minutes. If the swelling did not lessen, go to your doctor or hospital for anti allergy medicine.

When lip swelling is accompanied by shortness of breathe, go to the hospital immediately. This can be a very serious case of allergy and maybe life threatening.

How do you cure a swollen lip fast? there is no way to cure it fast as swollen lips will heal on its own. If you already drink an anti allergy, the swelling will decrease slowly.

My kid’s lip is swollen, what to do?

As parents, specially if this is the first time that you will encounter lip swelling, you need to be relax and do not panic. The first you need to do is apply an ice pack to the affected lip. Do not shout or show any signs of fear or worry to your kid. Act as if nothing happened and very calmly ask your kid what happened? Did they eat something? do they have difficulty in breathing? If they do have a difficulty in breathing, bring them to the nearest hospital. If there is none and they complain of itchiness, just continue applying ice, but if you think the swelling is not decreasing, bring them to the hospital for anti allergy medicine.

In my 9 years of being a mother and having 4 kids and meeting a lot emergencies, I have learned that our best armor in times of emergency is presence of mind of calmness.

Now you may be curios why I made a post like this.. well the same night, my third born experienced a swollen lip. We are not sure how it happened but when we went to the hospital, the doctor said it might b insect bite. An anti- allergy was administered and I just promised him a yo yo so he would stop crying. Th swelling went away after 12 or 15 hours.

Parenting Tip on Handling Failure, Honors and Graduation

It was deliberation day last Monday.. time for us to know how well our kids did this school year. Honestly, I am quite nervous that day, psyching myself not to get too excited about it. The reason why, it would be the first time that my second is included on “the list”. So I am really looking forward to that day and trying hard to fight my tears, oh boy, I super duper proud of my second born son (same goes for my first born of course).

On that day, as students were called, I can some moms showed their disappointment towards their kid’s ranking. I, on the other hand, is super happy with the achievement of my boys. I was expecting them to rank somewhere between 6-10 and not expecting any higher. But guess what? both was ranked as top 4 or both got second honorable mention. That’s quite a surprise and I almost cry.

Days before the deliberation, we promised the kids we will treat them in an out of town trip if at least one of them will rank 1-5 and a dinner at their favorite restaurant if 6-10. But I don’t want them to be disappointed so we just told them that whatever they rank, we will still have an out of town trip (Nueva Ecija here we come!)

We never give toys as a reward, most of the time it’s a dinner (sometimes with a cake for everyone or Cake Pops for all the kids) or an out of town trip. It’s how it works for us and it does not encourage siblings jealousy among the kids. I believe that giving a toy as a reward for having a good grade will not encourage the other one to strive harder. It will just bring rivalry in the house, something that we never want to happen.

Now, when I think of it, if I was on the position of the moms who got disappointed with their kid’s ranking, how will I handle it?

Control your emotion. It maybe very disappointing but as a parent, we need to control our emotions and never let our kids see that disappointment. I have learned in my years of being a mommy, that kids will always please their parents before anything else. In cases like this, showing them your disappointment will give them a heart ache. Give your child a moral boost by being happy of what they achieved and congratulate them as if they got all the medals the school can give.
Treating the kids whatever they rank also shows your support to them. If you think they were also expecting a higher rank and they got a lower one, celebrate it. Celebrate the fact that they still made it to the top.

My second born will also be graduating from being a pre-schooler. I know he’s quite excited because he will be transferring from the “big school” or the real school or to them kuya’s school. I know too, that deep inside him, he was afraid or that it not sinking to him yet that they will have to stay longer on the school and will have more subjects. This summer, aside from preparing them (second born and nephew) emotionally, we will also be preparing them academically starting with reading. In fact we are planning to make a mini library for their reading needs.

Tomorrow will be their Graduation day (or moving up ceremony.. changes due to k-12..more on that later) and Kuya’s recognition day and the start of a fruitful summer..

so how about you mommies, do you have a graduation/recognition related tip to tell? please share it with us!

*the photo was from 2010.. when kuya graduated from Pre school 🙂