One of the treats that Mateo loves is playing with our laptop. Most of the time, he’d ask us if he could play laptop games. He now knows how to play plants vs. zombies and has several moshi monster accounts. Sometimes he’d be content going to y3games.com and play numerous flash games. It can be a bit tiring though because he keeps on asking us to click here, pointing to different games as soon as he gets tired of a game we’re already playing. Sometimes, he would already have particular games in mind which he would ask us to look for.

Aside from the laptop, he loves playing with my brother’s PSP. We use it to keep him preoccupied whenever we go out and he is now adept at playing Daxter. As early as now, he’s turning out to be a sucker for video games, making Ramil smile and saying we should be buying a PS3 soon. Yeah, right!

I will be 35 weeks pregnant by the end of the week. Just a few more weeks before the baby comes out and I could finally start losing weight by breastfeeding and exercising.

At the start of this pregnancy, I’ve set a maximum weight gain of 30 pounds. That’s just about the total weight I also gained when I was pregnant with Mateo. During my check-up last week, I weighed 146 pounds. Considering that I started with 120 pounds, I only have 4 pounds to go So I’m thinking that Anika better come out as soon as she’s ready if I don’t want to go beyond 4 pounds. It’s a great help that my appetite has also gone down dramatically these past few days. However, I’ve been craving for sweets which will not do me any good, haha!

I’m still optimistic though, that I will not go beyond 150 pounds and I’m really, really eager to start breastfeeding so I could lose the extra weight. It helped a lot after I gave birth to Mateo, I didn’t really need weight loss tips because breastfeeding is an excellent way to lose weight.

So anyway, even Mateo keeps on asking when Anika would come out. I think we’re all eager to get rid of my big tummy. Haha!

My sister used to live with us in our rented house in Antipolo and when we planned on moving back here in Novaliches while waiting for our departure for Brunei, she had to look for another place to live in. She found a room she could rent near the school where we we used to teach as well. The biggest drawback is that we only get to see her every weekend.

Mateo is of course, the one most affected by the change. My sister is almost like his second mother. They are BFFs. The love playing and doing stuff together, and they are also the worst enemies, haha!

The past few weekends when my sister would be coming home here in Novaliches, Mateo would adamantly refuse to let her go when it’s time to leave already. Two weekends ago, he cried and said ‘I’m sad’ when she’s about to leave. He kept on saying ‘I’m sad already because Tita is not here anymore’ even after she left. Just this last weekend, he again refused to let her leave and cried pitifully, realizing he can’t do anything about it. This time, he said ‘I’m angry at you’.

It can be heartbreaking watching my son deal with it every weekend but I’m hoping he gets used to it lest I might suffer acne from it and need Acneticin. The only good thing is that there’s less fighting between the two of them. Haha! And Mateo looks forward to having her over every time the week is about to end. The whole thing makes me cringe whenever I think about all of us being so far in Brunei without Tita or the grannies. I’m already thinking that we have to make extra effort to make him happy there especially since there will be no other familiar faces except for me, Ramil, and baby Anika.

So we have finally decided to let Mateo stay in his current school, the traditional one that I was complaining about. Surprisingly, after relaxing and thinking that he’ll be there for only a few months anyway, we realized that he is actually coping really well, better than what we’ve expected. If things do proceed earlier than what we’re expecting, we’ll only be staying here until the end of October.

He’s slowly making friends and so far he has no problem catching up with his much bigger and much older Kinder classmates. Except for the fact that my boy does not really like writing that much, he has been proving to us that concepts-wise, it was good to let him stay with the Kinder class. He has also been doing better with homeworks as long as I let him do only a little at a time.

Ramil and I have decided not to stress too much about school. Right now anyway, we’re both technically unemployed so Mateo actually gets more ‘schooling’ at home than at any other time – Ramil explains a lot of technical stuff to him whenever they are playing with Powerglide (the transformer robot) and the Lego or when he tries to tinker with stuff like the barcode scanner when we go out; he already has subtraction and addition concepts from all the ‘if I eat two of your five cookies, how many will you have left?’ questions I’ve been giving him; his imagination is fueled with reading, movies, and surprisingly, TV commercials; and he gets to release some energy by running around, playing soccer on the street in front of our house, and biking. I figured getting into a traditional school may not be that big of an adjustment for him, having two teachers as parents

The tantrums, which I interpret to be adjustment blues, are still there and there are times when he would behave uncharacteristically dependent on us. However, I make sure to give him lots of random hugs and kisses to make him feel better about all the changes in his life right now. There have been really bad days when all I want is to lock myself in the bathroom and cry because he’s used up all the patience I’ve got. What’s worse about the bad days is that Ramil and I use up all our patience at the same time since we’re both with him all the time as well, hehe. Unlike before when Ramil would be coming home from school, full of patience and eager to be with Mateo, just when I’m grasping at the bottom of my patience bottle. It makes me cringe whenever I think of how crazy things would be when there are only FOUR of us in a foreign country. So help me God with a preschooler, a baby, AND house chores!

So anyway, Mateo is staying put as well because I’ve been doing the math and unless we don’t need to spend on anything else then we simply cannot afford a more expensive school. Also, I dread more adjustment if we decide to change schools again. The fact that he might think or feel that something is wrong with him that’s why he’s changing schools again, makes me think that getting what I want, the kind of school that I want, is not worth it especially since the current school will not exactly do any longterm, life-long damage to him.

Ever since my dad left again for another contract abroad, we’ve been using his Revo. It is such a big help especially now that it could get very difficult to commute with my big belly and our precocious three-year-old.

My mom just told me the other day to look for the lowest auto insurance since the Revo’s car registration is actually up for renewal this July. I have been researching online and otherwise and we are not yet fully satisfied with the lowest auto insurance I have found so far. We might have to decided within the week since we really have to process the registration renewal within the week.

Now that Ramil and I are once again experiencing the usual hassles of maintaining a car, we actually felt relieved that we’ve let go of our red car more than a year ago. We realize that not only don’t we have to worry about the lowest auto insurance, we also need not worry about maintaining a car which can be quite costly. Good thing also that we’re kind of used to not having any car for several months because we won’t have that luxury as well when we move to Brunei.

I am now in my 34th week which means I only have less than a month before I am in my 9th month and baby Anika can finally come out. With Mateo, I gave birth between my 37th and 38th week so I’m planning to hit the same mark with this one so as not to prolong the agony of the last weeks of pregnancy.

We were able to take a tour of the delivery room at the Cardinal Santos last Tuesday and I was pretty much satisfied with the facilities. The hospital is so much smaller than St. Luke’s where I gave birth to Mateo but it has a homier feel which I prefer. The staff at the delivery room were very friendly and accommodating and their normal delivery package is better than other hospitals because it comes with a private room accommodation unlike with other hospitals where you can only stay in a ward. However, the room is really small but since we don’t plan on entertaining visitors because we plan to room-in the baby, it would be more than enough. The room has its own comfort room, a TV, a small ref, a small sink and counter that could serve as ‘kitchen’, and a small couch that could be good enough for sleeping. My primary goal is to be able to conveniently breastfeed as soon as possible.

The realization that we only have around three weeks left has also made me and Ramil scramble for whatever scraps of money we still have, haha! Even if we want to, we cannot even sign up with cheap insurance companies because our resources are really limited. Delivery costs are no joke and we’re trying to build up a starting-all-over-again fund for our resettlement in Brunei.

Despite all the budget constraints, we’re doing just fine. We have almost all of Anika’s basic needs covered. Thanks to Mateo’s old clothes, we only needed to buy a few infant clothes and mittens since I gave away some of Mateo’s old ones. I realized that a baby does not really need much, a huge contrast to the excited-new-parents-lets-buy-everything attitude that we had with Mateo. Well, Anika might not be the recipient of everything new but she would surely get a more experienced pair of hands (and breasts) this time around.