Have Kids, Will Road Trip

Vaseline
Healthy White
SPF 24

Vaseline came out with Vaseline Healthy White SPF24 Triple Lightening last summer along with the Vaseline Road Trip of a Lifetime contest. The lucky winner Trina Samaniego got to take friends along on a road trip to various vacation spots in the Philippines! Oh, lucky lucky kids!

At the time, I just gave birth to Olly so I was house-bound for quite some time already and raring to be out and about! Of course, I shouldn't be so I didn't. I know I'm no spring chicken and child birth is equivalent to any extreme sporting event on the planet. Recovery is as important as the before and main event, especially since my body would never be called athletic by even the most tactful person. Lolz :D

Anyhoo, the roadtrip thing really sent me dreaming as I rocked Olly to sleep, confined to our room. I mean, I always wanted to travel and before we had kids, RF and I tried to take every available opportunity to go where we haven't gone before. I always fantasized about having a map on the wall and throwing a dart with my eyes closed. Then we'd go where it landed. God forbid I hit RF accidentally with that dart! We'd have nowhere to go but the ER then!

Another fantasy of mine is to pack a bag with the basics, go to the bus station, pier or airport and play travel roulette there. Not with the dart of course! Maybe pick a random detail like a number or color then hop on the corresponding transportation or destination, wherever it may be! :) lolz, mystery location! Fun for adventurers everywhere!

Ah, such excitement! But alas, such games of chance are no longer mine to play :) I got a hubby, a toddy and a baby.

Nowadays, I have to research target locations, rate for child-friendliness, pack ten suitcases a week in advance, book pack donkeys, camels and sherpas and secure maps with every available CLEAN toilet and hospital known to mankind. And that's just for two days.

My vacations nowadays are the sort I need a vacation from AFTER we get home. The following are a few pictures and what I learned from our Bolinao Road Trip earlier this year taken with my mother's side of the family to celebrate our Lola Mommy's 80th birthday. We went to Puerto Del Sol a little after summer so there wasn't a crowd to contend with :)

1. Location, location!

Choosing where to go and spend more than a day at, is the first challenge. Ratings largely depend on the hotel or resort's child-friendliness: safety, food availability/variety/palatability, activities, accomodation comfort, cleanliness, convenience and proximity to emergency rooms and pharmacies.

Research is the key. Go online, ask around and if you can afford it, check it out yourself first before dragging everyone to a place you've never been to. It wouldn't be fun if you found out that the hype didn't match the reality. Be flexible though and have some room for adventure :)



L-R Oona, eating biscuits; Daddy RF;
Mommyluscious Laya;
and Ollypolly, caught in the middle of a yawn.

 2. Transportation

It's a huge relief if you got your own private vehicle. No worries about rushing to stick to a schedule that doesn't revolve around your kids. Imagine riding a bus, taking a potty break at a stop-over and coming out to find your bus gone. Or colic strikes and the rest of the passengers are ready to riot and throw you and screaming baby out the moving coaster.

Private vehicles and kids are the *lurve*.

Just be sure that when you're driving, you have ample supplies in the car, enough gas/gas money, toll gate cards/money/tickets, your driver's license, a good navigator, a map and a substitute driver. I drove for ten hours straight from Bolinao, Philippines to Manila, Philippines. My spirit was willing but my body was weak. I will *never* do that again. 

3. Budget

Do I need to say more? With kids, whatever budget you had for splurging is automatically rerouted for emergencies. Absolutely no splurging unless you have a buffer reserved for that. I wouldn't recommend buying too many keepsakes either as this would just eat up precious space in your bag, extra weight to lug around and added mess you don't need at home. Pictures, a seashell or a cute shirt for the kids would be fine. Oh, and help the local industry and buy local delicacies to eat and bring home. They would make great pasalubong instead of those overpriced "I was at *blank*" shirts that would most probably get worn just once in their lifetime :)

4. What To Bring

EVERYTHING INCLUDING THE POTTY! RF, my husband, always teases me that I'd take the kitchen sink and refrigerator if I could fit them into the car. I think he should pack his stuff himself next time and if he needs a toothbrush or an extra pair of fuzzy socks, he can just go sailing back home to get one. I'm not giving up mine or the kids' to warm his stinky toes.

Seriously, sometimes it's better to over pack a few things than have to trudge all the way to civilization to buy something you already have in the first place.

Basic needs first:

Kids: Diapers, Bottles, Formula Milk, Bottled Water, Snacks, Clothes (Climate appropriate but bring jacket with hood for emergencies), blankies, little pillows, maximum of 3 toys, bath wash, toothbrush, alcamforado, manzanilla, sunblock, swim shoes

Adults: Clothes, toothbrush, Vaseline Healthy White SPF 24, slippers

Towels and toiletries are provided for by the resort already so that takes off some weight from your luggage!

First Aid Kit should include:

Medicine for Kids and Adults: Antihistamines, Paracetamol, Anti-diarrhea, Rehydration salts, calamine lotion, sunburn lotion

Ethyl alcohol, betadine, band-aids, cotton, gauze, cotton tips, tweezers, swiss utility knife, medical scissors, thermometer (better to pack both digital and mercury type) and all pertinent medical records of the kids.

Emergency numbers: Pedia's name and numbers, Blood type, known allergies and taken medication.

Jollibee Play Area at Hacienda Luisita, Tarlac
Lunch Break/Play Break

5. What To Do

Stop-overs. Frequent stop-overs. So you take your journey in increments for food, stretching, potty stops and general boredom breaks for the active toddler.

On the road, you play "I Spy" games, sing songs, count cars and include the little ones in the conversation. Be curious, appreciative and excited about the whole journey and the kids will take their cue from you. 

Oona in her floater :)

When you get to where you're going, any SMALL CHILD-friendly activity will do. No hiking or para-sailing or bunjee-jumping yet! Wait til they're ten years old at least for the more adventurous and semi-life-threatening expeditions.

Child-friendly means railings to dissuade curious toddlers from running into the tides, a swimming pool with a lifeguard, wading pools and little mini teeny tiny water slides.

Oona, Mommyluscious
and cousin Dame

Go for PRIVATE resorts as opposed to the huge, heavily populated popular public resorts as the contaminants would spell disaster for your child's sensitive skin and expose them to infectuous bacteria and viruses. Think people pee. Spit. Snot. That UFO: Unidentified Floating Object. In the swimming pool. Gag much yet?

Private resorts make me worry less about germs and help me concentrate on having as much fun as I can.

Which brings me to...

Oona and Daddy having a moment by the sea :)

6. When To Go

When everyone else and their aunts are home. Then YOU go. The rates are lower because it's off-season and you get to monopolize the whole place and the staff. With kids, you need all the help, service and attention they're advertising and you're paying for. You're also not going to fear that your kids are going to get lost in the crowd and get picked up by child-traffickers (so you can forgo the GPS implants for now).

Travelling with the kids isn't really as horrible or as hassle-ridden as this post sounds. It just depends on what you're focusing on.

Olly and Daddy on the hammock!

When it's the adventure of it that you're enjoying, the wonder and excitement that you see in your kids' faces as they cross the threshold from familiar sights to the unfamiliar, and the joy you hear in their laughter over new discoveries, nothing can be too bothersome for you.

Sweet Daddy and Olly

It's really the memories that matter. And as long as you PREPARE, you have nothing to worry about. All you would have to do is kick back and let the children you brought into this world show YOU how wonderful every little thing is :)

LUSCIOUS BLOG NETWORK ROLL CALL

So what have I been up to lately?

I can safely say that I have a new hat to wear: the Blogger Tweaker Hat. I'm not really a hacker, I can't invent code or CSS to save my life, but I do tweak existing and Already-Hacked Blogger Templates to suit my needs and wants. Sometimes I tweak them to death (not good). An example would be that 3-column template I wanted to convert into something else, I inserted a bit of code and then to my horror, sidebars and widgets ended up all over the place and refused to be reborn into something better than its former existence. As with anything, it had its limits and I had to let it rest in peace after it gave up the ghost in bytes and pieces.

At last I was able to finish revamping three of my existing blogs (Scraps Away, Weekend Wanderings and Luscious Picks) and put up a new blog for my photos named Photoluscious (what else?!). Mommyluscious I think I'll leave the layout alone and just streamline it a bit.

So here's my blog roll call, The Luscious Blog Network (naks!):

Of course Mommyluscious remains my standard bearer. It has since evolved from being the blog of a working mother trying to juggle motherhood and the demands of a growing art studio.

Mommy Laya quit the art studio a few months back. I haven't really covered the experiences and implications the decision to be a Stay At Home Mother presents because I'm still going through it now. All I can say is, there's much more time to spend being a Mother to Oona even if I do spend lots of time on the computer pursuing personal projects.

I'm lucky enough to have a very understanding husband. He does say that he likes me being home more than being a double-income family. Although of course, it would have helped if we financially prepared for my quitting ahead of time. But when you're not happy in a particular situation, there's no contingencies for that. Anyway, I am now a SAHM who's juggling the family budget, trying to find ways and means to add to it via projects I can do at home and with my limitations (time is such a valuable commodity with a baby!).

I blog, do graphics and try to be a mother to Oona as best as possible. I can also say I'm a recovering workaholic. Sometimes I get depressed over finances especially when bills get stacked in my in-box. Sometimes I envy the other people who have schedules and places to go to and things to DO. I know that sounds like a ton of regrets in the future. Honestly, I can't say what will happen ten years down the road, if my decision to quit and stay home will haunt me. But I do know the feeling passes.

Every time Oona achieves a milestone in her young life and I'm here to witness it...no salary in the world matters. Other parents know what I'm talking about. It's different when you're single. It's different when your child discovers she has legs and can run around and the nanny just tells you about it when you get home from work. It's different when it's YOU she runs to with that face split in a smile so wide, it melts your heart, with the look in her eyes that says "Look, MOM! LOOK!!!". :D

Scraps Away is my digital scrapping blog. It's really in my DNA to do something creative and it's to make sure my creative muscles don't atrophy. Nowadays, since I took this crash course in Template manipulation and blog improvement, I haven't been able to update as regularly as before. Rest assured though, I have a couple of LO's already in the pipeline, just waiting to be finished and posted.



To satisfy my wanderlusting, I came up with Weekend Wanderings. Travel is really one of the things RF and I love. We also want to impart to Oona the wonders of the world we live in, our own backyard, most importantly. I'm not really a die-hard nationalista, but I do have an intense appreciation for this place. There's really so much to like and enjoy more than complain about. After all, it isn't the actual place you go to, but the myriad little things that get you there that makes the destination really special.

I put up this blog primarily as a partner to Weekend Wanderings. I find that I really am trigger-happy, just about as much as my husband is with his camera phone. At first, using my N95 8GB was a means to an end since I have a Canon Ixus as well. But I found myself using my Nokia more because it was easier to whip out and I didn't need to carry around extra memory cards just to augment my Canon's 16MB default card. Besides, they're both 5 Megapixels so not much difference when it comes to resolution.

So, I am currently indulging my National Geographic Photographer fantasies using my trusty camera phone with a beautiful 8GB storage space. I did adjust the photos' contrast and saturation a bit with Google's Picasa, but all the photos came from my phone. Someday, I hope to be able to save up for a DXLR, the real sweet deal! Until then, I plan to enjoy this little baby.

Last but not the least, my blog for stuff that I like online and offline. I love a lot of stuff that I can't usually afford, but you don't really need money to appreciate beautiful things. For me, the truly beautiful things are truly useful things as well. Yes, lingerie are useful things. They make you feel beautiful, so there! That's why in this blog, I have lingerie, earth-friendly furniture, baby stuff, make-up and power tools in the same place. I just don't have car accessories or hard-core guy stuff (like jockstraps or whatever only for guys thingies there are). I can't drive and I'm not a guy. Anyway, I put stuff in here in case anybody stumbles on this blog and happens to be looking for something I've already seen. Hope this blog helps!

So there you have it, my starting five. Check them out and let me know what you think! Enjoy! :)