For some reason, I have forgotten the existence of another baby blog I made for Eric, until I logged into my Blogger account recently and saw some posts that I didn’t even realize I made. The amazing thing was, there were 32 posts in total, dating back to 2002! I never knew I had posted so much in the baby blog before.

I’ll be working on moving all its content one by one into this one. It’s so much easy to consolidate everything rather than have everything strewn around. The only thing I’ll be keeping in the blog would be the blog template, just so that I can see a history of how The Blog of Rugrats grew to what it is now.

I’ve been trying for months to get my blog listed in The Mom Blogs to no avail. When I first submitted this site, they sent me a response saying that they can’t find the the required back link to their blog and wanted me to re-submit, but the strange thing was that the link they wanted was in clear view in the sidebar. I waited until a month or so before I re-submitted. This time, I kept getting stuck on their link checking section (where I was suppose to input my URL to verify that it hasn’t existed in their directory) and got an error saying that “the link is not available or cannot be accessed”.

I’m not gonna be bothered with listing in the Mom Blogs and have removed the back link. I’m sure there are better general and niche blog directories out there that are worth my time.

There are only a few sites I visit that I would absolutely recommend to every expectant moms and the already-mommies. I found these web sites when I was expecting Eric, and have been using the information in these sites ever since.

Although nothing could prepare you emotionally and physically for the actual thing, doing some reading might help you to mentally prepare and expect fewer surprises. Also, take all the advice and knowledge you gained with a grain of salt. Always, if in doubt, consult your doctor. He or she will be more than happy to help you.

BabyCenter.com and its sister site, ParentsCenter.com. I have been a faithful subscriber of its newsletter since 2001. I wish I had used the info in this site earlier. The site is much more understanding when it comes to breastfeeding and doesn’t leave you feeling guilty if you are one of those people who can’t breastfeed successfully, like me. I love the personalized info and weekly e-mails on the progress of your pregnancy as well as some parenting tips.

ParentsPlace.com. An iVillage sub-site, what I liked most about this site is the Q&A column on a wide variety of subjects related to pregnancy and parenthood. This site is very much pro-breastfeeding, though, so much so that it could leave those who couldn’t breastfeed well (like myself) feeling depressed.

Oxygen.com. A wonderful site for women. The chat rooms and forums are especially useful, so do go ahead and find a support group for pregnancy or for advice on baby care and breastfeeding. The chat groups are very supportive groups and helped me go through my first weeks of postpartum while I was home-bound.

Eric, Joel and myself were in the car on our way back from Tuaran to Kota Kinabalu today, while rain was pouring down hard. While I was driving, I told Eric about tomorrow being an election day and that we’ll be going out very early to be at our polling station so that we can vote early and go home right away to avoid a huge crowd.

My 7-year old Eric looked out and answered, “I read the newspaper just now and it said it’s going to rain today.” A little surprised that he’d paid attention to the papers, I asked a matter-of-factly, “Oh, you did?” At the same time, I realized that it would be a good idea to check on tomorrow’s weather, and whether it’s better to go voting in the morning or the afternoon. I found out a minute ago that the weather reports predicted cloudy skies in the morning, and probably heavy rain in the afternoon.

Wherever you are in Malaysia, remember to check the weather tomorrow if you plan to go voting tomorrow.

I love showing off my kids’ photos online to friends and family members and anyone else who would care to look at it — I mean, what proud parent wouldn’t be? Last year, though, I read a blog post on how irresponsible people could take advantage of your baby photos and manipulate them in a very disgusting way. Since I often blog and include baby photos into each entry, I abruptly stopped blogging on the Blog of Rugrats to see other alternatives to keeping my children’s photos online yet still protected.

Really, the only way for us to protect our baby photos online is by not putting them online at all. My next best alternative would be to use image hosting web sites that have built-in security to allow only authorised users like family and friends to access them. I personally chose Flickr because:

1. It’s now integrated with my Yahoo! account. This also means that my friends and family who has a Yahoo! e-mail accounts can instantly access my protected baby photos without having to create a new account.
2. I can store as many baby photos as I want. That’s because I’m currently subscribed to the Pro version, which only cost me USD9.99 at the time I signed up for it, and I can upload an unlimited amount of photos in.
3. It has some very cool meta data generators which I find very useful. Do you know that if you take photos off your digital camera or phone with built-in camera, your device will store extra information about the photos, such as the camera model you used to take the picture with, as well as the ACTUAL date that the photo was taken? I found those information very useful because I tend to forget which phone I used to take it or the date that the photo was taken.

There are so many other things that I can do with Flickr in terms of storing my baby photos, so those were just three of my reasons for using it. Care to share your favourite baby photo storage online?