Choosing a day-care centre, like many things in life involving your baby or toddler, is never easy. Heck, I’ve been through numerous paeditricians for several months before settling for the best one I could find. Which brings about the question, what makes a childcare centre good? What sort of criteria must it possess to quality as the childcare centre of choice? Of course, there’s no such thing as perfect. What appears to be the perfect childcare centre to you may not suit another parent. So word-of-mouth should be taken with a grain of salt. Try your best, be patient and draw up a list of criterias on what you look for in a childcare centre. Think about what is important and your expectations in a childcare centre. As a start, here’s a few things to consider:

Reputation of the childcare centre

Call up your friends or family who are parents of children within your child’s age group. They are likely to have gone through most of what you’re now looking for and their experience is appreciated. I’m sure they’ll be glad to answer all your questions about the childcare centre they’re sending their children to. At the end of the day, you’ll probably have a handful of childcare centre recommendations. Your first task is completely.

Childcare centre’s premise, environment and atmosphere

First impression counts a lot in this regard. A good childcare centre should excude a pleasant, welcoming, and friendly atmosphere. The environment should feel safe, clean, nurturing and comfortable.

Floors, walkways, walls and kitchen should be at their cleanest possible. Toilets, diaper changing facility and trash disposal areas not only has to be clean, they need to situated as far as possible from other areas.

Various environmental elements - lighting, ventilation and temperature is another factor to consider.

As for safety, check for things like smoke alarms, first aid facility, fire extinguisher and a slew of child-proof tools and techniques. To ensure your toddler can go about the childcare centre safely, make sure things like safety gates, door latches, covered outlets and more are present both indoors and outdoors. Medicines and hazardous substances should be stored safely and out of reach. Furnitures, toys and equipment that comes in contact with children should be child-proofed and in good working condition to prevent accidents.

Which brings me to my niece who has a pet dog. Her dad is a dog lover and runs a local pet lovers gathering during certain weekends. He is also toying with the idea of setting up a website for pet lovers community. Unlike other countries, there’s hardly a community website of pet lovers with significant number of members.

One such website is Zootoo.com which I’ve recently signed up, where pet lovers can join, connect and share. And what exactly do they share? Things like pet photos, pet videos, pet care, local pet products and services and many more. Zootoo.com members can also use the website as a platform to reach out to other pet lovers locally or abroad. Its like your pet’s social networking website.

Another thing which begs mentioning is Zootoo.com’s commendable effort in reaching out to pets in need of help. Zootoo.com have different promotions to help pet shelters and rescue groups around the country, among which they donate up to $1mil makeover every year to a deserving and community supported shelter.

We’ve made some changes to her diet. She’s eating a lot more solids these days. There’s three servings of a variety of porridge - lunchtime at 12pm, dinner at 6pm and finally a very small portion at 8pm just before bedtime. You might say she’s eating a lot of porridge but do bear in mind she is very reluctant to drink milk.

Babies her age should consume daily twice as much milk than what she’s drinking right now. It is a very difficult task to bottle feed her. Baby Clarisse wants to be entertained to such an extent its driving us bonkers, especially at 4-5am at dawn when we could barely keep our eyes open. I have to keep at it no matter how difficult it may be and hope someday she’d develop a liking for milk. She is fed a mix of cereals and milk very early in the morning when she wakes up hungry. Baby Clarisse ritually wakes up between 5am to 7am, so my husband and I wakes up extra early these days to feed a struggling baby every morning. Nerve-wrecking at times. Her next feeding of milk will be at 3pm, kinda like teatime between lunch and dinner.

Unlike the past one year where baby Clarisse is nursed whenever she demands for breastmilk, I’ve fixed a fairly rigid feeding schedule now to keep her tummy filled.

Baby Clarisse’s rather tiny wardrobe is filled to the brim so the cloths has to be put in a plastic container for now. I’m going to sort them out later and see which ones could fit. I think they look rather large for a one year old. Baby Clarisse is rather small built for her age so I guess half of those clothes won’t fit yet.

It took 2 weeks for the milk to dry up. My breast returned to normal so I went to my OB for a recommendation letter to a general surgeon of his choice to excel my breast lump. I was referred to Dr Mahendra Mano at Ipoh Specialist Centre and shortly within an hour, Dr Mano attended to me.

My initial plan was to book a time for the minor surgery on Monday. But Dr Mano did an ultrasound scan of my breast and immediately asked the nurse for a syringe. He wanted to try removing the lump through a syringe because he suspect it is just a milk cysts with harden dried milk trapped within. He said the lump does not appear to be solid and he wanted to suck the fluid out with a syringe on the spot. I was kinda shocked truth be told.

Thank god, he was right! The milk cyst was gone after nearly 5ml of thick milky substance being drawn out into the syringe. It was such a simple procedure and it barely took 5 minutes. I was at his clinic for just 10 minutes tops.

My husband and I were glad that it’s just a harmless milk cyst and I don’t have to opt for a minor surgery to remove what initially thought to be a fibrocystic lump. Secondly, outpatient surgery no matter how minor starts at RM800 onwards. I paid just RM96 for today’s procedure including a 3-day course of antibiotics. My next check up will be a week from today.

Yes you’re right. Some equipment were fried by a freak lightning strike. His desktop CPU and our Linksys wireless router modem is down. The LCD monitor survived and perhaps some components within the desktop CPU is salvageable. He’ll give it a thorough testing tomorrow to find out about it.

I’m lucky my ThinkPad notebook wasn’t plugged in when the lightning striked out of nowhere. A fried notebook is going to cost me bigtime in repairs.

Now that our wireless Linksys router modem is dead, we are using our old cable modem+router as a backup. We’ll be getting a new wireless router+modem tomorrow.

He has also switched anti-virus. We were running Avast! anti-virus but as of now, my resident anti-virus is NOD32 which claims to be one of the fastest. As a start, it does use much less ram than Avast!.

One of the most useful malware preventive software we installed lately is SandBoxie. Google it and I suggest you give it a try. Do pardon the crude comparison, imagine the condom as one of the best ways to ensure safe sex. SandBoxie protects your PC pretty much the same way as it isolates the browser (and any programs you choose to use it with) from the internet. No malware from the internet can pass SandBoxie and do damage to your PC. It’ll sure save you a lot of headache. Check it out.