Boricua en la Lima

I'm doing this so I can enter a contest to win $5,000. Yes, that's how desperately I need the money. Anyway, I did have a pretty interesting LASIK story, so I thought it could be worth sharing. I had bad eyesight for as long as I can remember, I probably started using glasses since I was around 5 years old, which you can imagine is a guarantee that you won't be considered cool at school, ever again. It's also a guarantee that you'll never be good at sports, and especially not good at anything having to do with swimming, since who wants to play "Marco Polo" with a person who is blind even without covering their eyes up. But that was me. Of course with time my prescription got worse and worse and by the time I was about 10 I was already like -6.5 in one eye and -5.5 in the other eye. Pretty close to legally blind and legally as uncool as they came. It didn't help matters that I was always at the top of the class in all my academics and weighed li...

Well it's official, the girls ROCK at Cranium and the guys...not so much. One thing has been proven, another one is showing a high correlation but has yet to be proven. What has been proven is that, even without Poliana's lucky dice throwing, we can win the race on sheer talent. However, we did try to invoke Poliana's dice throwing soul to come and possess us a few times throughout the game, although to no avail. By the way it was also proven that I suck at dice throwing which is why I will never win the lotto or win at the casino or anything of the sort. What has yet to be proven is, Tariq is the men's cranium for Cranium. Yes, the correlation so far is 0.99, when he's there they've won when he's been absent they've lost. But we need to have one more game where Tariq is actually participating to see if the guys can manage to win again. Also, we were one "woman" down, as the fact that Gigi's pregger s is causing her cranium to...

I was discussing with my friends at work a very important subject, who sang "I think we're alone now", was it Tiffany or Debbie Gibson? I said of course it's Tiffany and Jamie asked, why are you so sure? I said, because Tiffany only had ONE hit, and that was it. And then Jamie said, didn't she have some slow song too? And I said yeah, but it sucked, as I proceeded to belt out in my totally non-singer's voice COULD'VE BEEN SO BEAUTIFUL! COULD'VE BEEN SO RIGHT! Remember that song? It's funny how people are constantly confusing Tiffany and Debbie Gibson don't you think? Anyway, here's what could've been...As of this next Friday, I could've been on a plane to Tuscany to enjoy the posh life with my friend Lety . She's got a villa in Tuscany and she invited a few friends for a relaxing time full of wine-tastings, sight-seeing, and just anything associated with "Lifestyle of the Rich & Famous". So you must be thinking...

OK don't read this if you haven't seen it yet...or you will be as mad as I was after actually having seen it! So I did research for like the last half an hour (I'm going to sleep now I promise) and this is what I've gathered: Addison, George and Burke are ALL leaving the show and that's why they wrote their story lines the way they did. Although apparently Burke was fired, but Addison has a clause in her contract where she can come back if her new spin off "Private Practice" isn't successful, and George has a "come back whenever you want to" deal. The girl at the end is supposedly Meredith's half-sister, who was the exact same girl that McDreamy met at the bar the night before. So I guess the irony there is that McDreamy meets Meredith and her half-sister in the exact same way, although I really can't see how Meredith has a half-sister who also happens to be a surgeon at Seattle Grace, it's too much coincidence. So I guess Callie ...

I don't have anything funny or pithy to talk about, except that I'm mad that I had to pay $1500 to get my car maintenance yesterday. It was all a bunch of stuff I knew I had to do since a long time ago, but I'd just never taken the time. So I won't bore you with "$1500 for car maintenance...knowing your daughter is safe in your car...priceless" crap. I had to get 3 tires replaced, front and back brakes replaced, alignment, air filter changed, you name it I had to get it. At least the "check engine soon" light that had come on earlier this week didn't result in some major engine trouble because otherwise the bill would have probably added up to like $3000 instead of a "measly" $1500. I guess the car is going on 4 years this year, so all this stuff was bound to come up soon enough. But the title of the blog relates to how my cash flow has been massacred in the last month, between the $4100 for Uncle Sam, the $4000 we had to pay for our Ch...

This is from one of my favorite brands, they are soft-soled baby shoes that I discovered when I had Gabriela. They have the cutest designs ever, I now give these as gifts to new moms whenever I can't find their registry. Gabriela's most recent designs are the lady bug ones. I got this email and immediately went to their web site to send free Mother's Day e-cards to my girlfriends who are moms. The server was down because they were too busy so I guess they were getting a ton of hits for the free e-cards, which were as adorable as the shoe designs are. Now that Gabriela's in the toddler room and she gets to go outside every day they are telling us to only have the kids wear the harder-soled shoes, but she still wears her cute Robeez on the weekends when she's just chillin'. Also, here's a picture they took of Gabi at day care and put it in a nice little picture frame for me for Mother's Day so I wanted to pass on Gabi's wishes for a Happy Mother's ...

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I saw this video at a training about Diversity our Company had about 2 months ago. My husband's boss was a speaker and he ended his already inspirational chat with this. It brought tears to my eyes immediately, probably due to my recent motherhood status. I was just so thankful that Gabriela is such a healthy independent child and I hoped and prayed that she and I would always have the close relationship and love between them that these two people obviously have. If I could only be half as supportive and important to Gabi as this dad is to his son I will be the most fulfilled and content person on Earth. Enjoy! And you might want to get some tissues before pressing "play".

After what seems like months and months of talking about the excitement of going to Puerto Rico for Jero & Elika ’s wedding, the gazillion wedding planning details which made my own wedding look like a simple affair in comparison, the day finally arrived for us to fly down to Puerto Rico. Gabi was unbelievably good on the way down despite what seems like a very difficult stage. Don’t get me wrong, she’s still as cute as ever, but in true toddler-hood style, she doesn ’t want to sit still for a single second. Plus she’s been going through what seems to be a very difficult transition to the toddler room at day care. Probably more difficult for me than it is for her, but she’s not SUPER EXCITED to go into day care in the morning like she used to be with her old room and her old teacher Tracy. We arrived on Wednesday afternoon and went to dinner with Jose’s mom who was in town. She’s deathly afraid of flying so I know it took a great deal of courage for her to get on a plane just to...

I had to fly down to Atlanta this week for work and I was transported back to past times, namely the summer of '96. The last time I was in Atlanta was exactly 11 years ago. I was doing a summer internship during my MIT days with Amoco. My first internship was in Chicago (Naperville to be more specific in 1994) and my second internship was in Atlanta in 1996 during the Summer Olympics. That was a very memorable summer, and as I look back on it I can totally laugh about it, but back then I thought I was in a living hell... Here are some of the highlights: Being at the Olympic park about an hour before the bomb. Thankfully I had to leave to go pick up my then boyfriend at the airport. Having to leave my "host's" house in the middle of the day with HR by my side and the alarm bell ringing because the guy was a pig and the company should've never set me up to stay at his house in the first place. Needless to say they ended up having to pay rent on an apartment for me, ...

I had previously done a post about Things to do in Puerto Rico . Well yes, a lot of you might say Puerto Rico seems a lot more fun than Cincinnati, but I figured I should also write about things to do in Cincinnati for three main reasons: a) I've already lived here almost 3 years so I guess I feel like more of an expert now b) A lot of my old co-workers from Puerto Rico are in the process of moving to Cincinnati so I think could do with some recommendations, and c) I just got a magazine that included these (May/June 2007 issue of "Inspire Cincinnati") so I'm basically just "shamelessly reapplying" Top 9 Cincinnati Boutiques: 2700 Erie, Hyde Park, 2700 Erie Avenue, 513-533-0042 Addison Mac, Crescent Springs, 566 Buttermilk Pike, 859-344-8666 Alligator Purse, Hyde Park, 2701 Erie Avenue, 513-871-6171 Arte Nouvelle , Hyde Park, 3445 Edwards Road, 513-841-2783 Boutique Hope, Oakley, 3096 Madison Road, 513-321-0600 Julia's on Camargo , Madeira, 8065 Camar...

We just came back from Puerto Rico and I have to say it's probably one of my favorite places on Earth. I went to the beach 3 times and I loved every minute of it, especially because I had my two grandmas and my friend Natalia there too. The food was great as usual. At day care, I'm now in my big kids rooms (the toddler room). I'm still getting used to the new kids and teachers so I'm really happy that my friend Lia moved with me from the Cardinal room. The weather in Cincinnati seems to have warmed up permanently, but we're still waiting for the pool in our backyard to warm up. I still enjoyed it last night even though it was freezing!

Since Mara is leaving us for Boston in a few weeks, we have decided to start a farewell countdown with what we are calling "Discovery Sundays"; every Sunday we try to do something we haven't done before in Cincinnati, go somewhere we haven't been, see something we haven't seen... This weekend brought to us several neat discoveries. On Saturday there wasn't too much for me to discover, although Mara and Gabi had their fair share. I went to my charity fashion show practice on Saturday morning while Mara was nice enough to babysit Gabi. They went to Ault Park and discovered the children's playground area which I hadn't even found yet. Mara says she met a bunch of other little kids and their parents and that she felt like she was in the book "The Nanny Diaries " (I have lovingly nicknamed Mara my nanny). Gabi's discovery was how fun it can be in Mara's convertible Beetle. Here's a video of her rocking to the beat of the car st...

I got this emailed to me about 5 years ago and back then laughed at how incredibly ridiculous it seemed. I was finally lucky to have gotten it sent back to me again, this time thanks to YouTube's techology. Today I cry, because of how incredibly close it comes to what I do on a daily basis. Lotto tickets anyone? Enjoy...

It seems that everywhere I go I take the cold with me. When I went to Miami for Elika's bachelorette it was 45 degrees, and this weekend in Austin for Miguel and Veronica's wedding, it was like in the 50's and WINDY like all hell. In fact everyone kept joking that we were actually in Chicago. So I guess first off I must apologize to the bride and groom for bringing the bad weather with me. However, despite the fact that we froze our asses off all weekend long (especially in skimpy dresses on Saturday), the weekend was a blast and all the activities around the wedding were awesome. Here are the weekend highlights... Friday: It took Jose and I a WHILE to get to Austin. We missed our connection out of Dallas because the flight out of Indy arrived late. Then Jose gets placed in the 4 pm flight out of Dallas but I don't get placed until 7 pm. We had the rehearsal dinner at 7 pm plus bad weather was supposed to be coming into the area so we decided to do the 3 hr. drive. We...

I just went through a serious case of "verguenza ajena" as they call it in Puerto Rico. It means I'm embarrassed for someone else, JLo in this case. I just watched her on Idol correcting Ryan Seacrest on his Spanish but Ryan had it right and SHE had it wrong! I love JLo don't get me wrong, but please don't pretend like you can speak Spanish if you really can't. It's OK if you don't know Spanish, that doesn't make you any less Hispanic, you're still Jenny from the block. But learn your Spanish chica.

We're heading to Austin on Friday for one of Jose's high school friend's weddings. It promises to be a fabulous affair, though I have to admit I'd much rather they have had their wedding in Puerto Rico (the groom is Puerto Rican ) so that I could have yet another excuse to travel to Puerto Rico. We are leaving Gabriela with my sister in Indiana tomorrow night and and then leaving out of Indiana on Friday morning. I know we'll miss Gabriela terribly, but I'm sure she'll have a blast hanging out with my sister and nephew and their 2 dogs Meche and Cooper, and I have to admit I'll be so happy to be able to sleep late all weekend (which means being able to drink the night before!). I can't bring myself to pack, but I have at least gotten a pedicure and a not-so-painful bikini wax at Hair and Body Works . Gotta love it when you don't go through as nearly as much pain as you thought you would. Just need to pack now instead of blogging...Oh wait, a ...

Since it's been so freaking cold in Cincinnati (Spring didn't stay for long) we can't take nice pictures outside and go to parks and stuff. Which means our Easter Weekend was somewhat anti-climactic vs. my dreams of outside Easter egg hunts and beautiful spring dresses. Poor Jose's dad Pepe was here the whole weekend and all we could do was go out shopping and go out to eat, which brings me to... Gabi confirms yet again why she's my daughter, and why it'll always be so hard for her to do Atkins. She loves carbs too much. Here she demonstrates her pasta-eating abilities. For some reason I can't help but think of the movie "Big Daddy" and smile a big smile... My favorite part is when she looks at the camera because she knows she's getting filmed. Movie star in the making... Here she is with Mara at Cheesecake Factory, we went for a late Easter Sunday lunch and I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of their menu selections are quite Atki...

We went to the Lunken Airport Park again this Sunday. Gabi is just loving it so much. This time we went with Mara and we walked around the loop for a while while Gabi slept. When she woke up from her nap she was full of energy and ready to play. She has been going down the slide with someone always holding her hand, but this time she decided she was a grow-up girl and she was going to do it on her own. Mara and I were encouraging while Jose was having a nervous breakdown... Here's Gabi in the swings. She makes us take her from one swing to the next to the next, and then start all over again. She just loves swinging. The funny thing is that no matter how hard we try to tell her, she will always lean forward instead of leaning back and so she always looks like she's about to flip over on her head. And finally, here she is on top of her new discovery, the "bouncy bouncy". There's two of these "bouncy bouncies" at the park and she also makes us go back ...

'Twas the weekend before Easter And all through the city Not a creature was stirring Not even P Diddy The Hoyas and Ohio State Fighting in Atlanta City Hoping to make it To the Big Dance Monday evening But our friends and I Were out sitting pretty Cause there's always good food In our dear old "pig" city A Broadway show downtown Had Simba right in it He fought Scar to the end And was friends with Rafiki The picture above is from our group after eating At Trattoria Roma To celebrate Gigi