Snow Days

When I was a small child I lived in Queens, NY for a while, and that was the first time I ever saw snow, since Puerto Rico never sees snow.  I immediately fell in love with the snow, I would even get upset and couldn't understand how there where mean people who would throw salt at the snow.  As a 4 year old child, I could not understand how people wanted to take away the snow from the sidewalk.

I remember that one time I was sick and it snowed and I wanted to play outside but I couldn't, so my mom took a sleigh that I had (it was a red circle) and she left it outside to accumulate snow and then brought it inside for me to play. I can remember as if it was today, playing with the snow that day.

Many years passed and I am again living in NYC where there is snow, and my children are as much in love with snow as I was back then when I was 4. The only difference is that now, as a grown woman and a mother, I can understand why people put salt in the snow, and why there is a need to get rid of it, yet my daughters still don't.

I must say that I don't like snow anymore. I only like how it looks while it falls, and how pretty it is those first few hours, but then reality strikes, and I am left to deal with the shoveling, the digging out the car, the slush, the blocked streets, the cold, and all of that and it makes me wish I was in the warm weather and able to go to the beach to relax.

I have noticed that a lot of my friends who live in warm climates, dream of snow, and those who live in cold climates dream about warm weather. The Grass may be greener on the other side for some, but what do you think, do you enjoy Snow days? Or do you prefer the warm climates?

Health & Beauty - Insect Bites and Sun Burn, how do you deal?

This past few weeks in Puerto Rico I encountered myself actively dealing with insect bites and sunburn. The first time we went to the beach I bought a Sunblock Spray for kids and waterproof 70 SPF. I sprayed my girls and continued to enjoy the time at the beach. At the end of the day my daughter Gaby had burned her shoulders, and I had burned part of my back, so I had to run to the pharmacy to buy some after sun care to relieve my daughter's pain. We were surprised because we did put sunblock on each other. But after taking a look back I realized that we made a few mistakes of sun safety.

#1. We put sunblock on ourselves at the beach. It is recommended that sunblock be applied 30 minutes before being exposed to the sun to give the lotion time to be absorbed into the skin and work better.

#2. We applied Spray sunscreen in a windy place. There was a lot of wind at the time we applied the sunscreen so most of it must have blown away instead of sticking on each other.

#3. We didn't double check that we reached all the needed spots. We did a quick spray and were not very thorough. It is necessary to make sure to put on sunscreen in all exposed areas for good protection.

And the other thing we had to deal with was mosquito and midges bites. For those of you who don't know what midges (or Majes in spanish) are, they are a tiny little bug, the size of a fruit fly more or less, and they gather in places near water and come out mostly at dawn.

The last day we went to the beach it was raining early so we were able to enter the water late, when the sun was not at it's peak, it was cloudy so we didn't even put on sunblock (another no, no of skin safety) and when the sun started to set and we gathered our seashells and towels and headed towards the car, we took a few minutes to stand at the peer and that's when I noticed the Majes flying around my legs. I didn't think much of it, I mean I had not been at the beach this late in more than 2 years so I wasn't really thinking the bites were going to be too bad, but there I was back in NYC with over 25 bites in my legs and back. Tiny little bites that looked like mosquito bites except smaller, as my mosquito bites tend to swell a lot and appear bigger than a quarter. These bites were more the size of a pea, but itched for over a week. I tried researching online about these biting midges but there wasn't much helpful information. So I just put on calamine lotion on them 2 to 3 times a day and wished for the itch to go away.

Now that the weather is getting better, how to you take care of your skin and protect yourself from sunburn and insect bites?