Uh-oh! It's Mother's Day again, and how many of you are still wondering what to do for your Mum tomorrow?

At least you're trying to find something to do for her tomorrow. I know of people who don't even know there's a special day to celebrate our mothers!

There are, of course, the usual things you can do for your mom. Like buying her the usual gifts - jewellery, perfumes, branded purses, a spa treatment, all expense paid shopping trip, bringing her for out for a fine dining experience or a special meal.  (Look at the bottom of this post for special offers in these categories) At this last minute, these might be a good option to go for.

But nothing can beat the sweetness of making a personalised gift for mum. Here are a few easy-to-do craft ideas, borrowed from Pinterest, that can make Mother's Day a little sweeter for the most beloved woman in your life.

1. Make a Mother's Day card with a heart in the middle

Things you will need:

• Coloured paper
• Scissors
• Your hand :)
• Coloured pens, pencils, crayons, marker pens or anything of your choice which can be used to write on the paper. 

Taken from: http://krokotak.com/2012/03/tchestit-8-mart/

Here's how to do it:

1. Fold the paper

2. Keep your hand on the folded paper, with your thumb touching the folded side.

3. Trace the shape of your hand.

4. Cut out the shape. Do not cut through the middle of the paper or else it won't open up like a card; it will just become 2 pieces of paper.  However, if you do accidentally cut it, fret not - just use a clear tape to tape it together. Or repeat the steps (correctly, this time) on another piece of paper.

Taken from http://krokotak.com/2012/03/tchestit-8-mart/

5. That's it, actually. You're card is almost complete. Now, just add your messages, and a splash of colour. Get creative! Use any form of decoration on your card to personalise it. Just make sure you leave enough space for your message.

Tip: Write your message first, and then proceed with the decoration.

There you have it - an economical and easy-to-make gift for your mom. Have Fun!

2. Thumbprint Love

This is an awesome idea for Dads planning to help their young ones prepare something for mommies. It is really simple to do.

Things you will need:
 * Paint
 * Paper (coloured or plain)
 * Coloured pen or pencils
 * A poem
 * A photo of you and your child or your family (optional)
 * Scissors (optional)
 * Fingerprints

The steps:

1. Fold the paper into half, if you want this to look like a card. If not, leave it as it is or cut it to your desired size.

2. Dip your or your child's finger into the paint and create a finger paint art. It can be anything. Even just random colourful drops on the paper. Or you can make the flower shown on the left.

3. Write the poem, as shown, under the flower if this is a one page card. You can even make this on a thin, hard piece of paper to be used as a bookmark. If it's the kind of card that can be opened, then write the poem inside. You can either leave the front blank with just the art or write Happy Mother's Day or any other message you like.

Simple isn't it?

Original idea taken from here.

3. Flower Coupons

Ahem.. this should be done on a regular basis, but more of that later. Apart from being pampered, what do you think mothers will love for Mother's day (or any other day, for that matter?)

Taken from: http://steppingintofirstgrade.blogspot.sg/2011/04/mothers-day.html

Exactly! She would love someone to help with the chores!! This is a very inexpensive way to pamper your mother. 

Things you will need: 

• Coloured papers
• Scissors
• Pen or markers
• Adhesive (Glue or Clear Tape)

How to make it:

1. First cut out the shapes of a flower pot and as many flowers as you need. These flowers are going to be "coupons" that your mother can choose to use on the special day. This can even be given to her as a birthday present. 
2. Then glue the left side, right side and bottom part of the flower pot figure onto another larger piece of paper. Make sure you just glue the edge and not the whole area. Leave the top of the flower pot unglued. 
3. Then make stems for the flowers. There are 2 ways to make it. Either cut a long thin strip of paper or roll up a piece of paper. The rolled up stem would be sturdier than the long thin strip.
4. Attach the flower shapes to one side of the stem. Use a glue or a clear tape to fix it. Make sure you are able to push this flower into the flower pot. 
5. Write down the coupons. You can either write it on a separate piece of paper and fix them on the flowers as shown above, or just write straight onto the flowers. 
6. Write a note for your mum, with instructions (like the fine print rules and regulations on a coupon) and stick it on the flower pot. 

That's it. You're pot full of flower coupons are ready for your mum. 

4. I love you thiiiiiiissssss much!

That's right. This is probably the easiest of all to make. 

What you will need: 

* Coloured paper

* Scissors
* Handprint
* Adhesive (glue, double-sided tape or clear tape)
* Marker pens, pens, pencils or crayons

Steps to make it:

1. Like the first idea above, trace the shape of your or your child's hand on two pieces of paper.

2. Cut out the two shapes. Write a message on one side of both the pieces. It can be as simple as "I love you" or any other message as per your preference. 

3. On another piece of paper, write a message or simply write "I love you this much!" and cut it out. 

4. Fold this piece of paper the way you would fold to make a fan. 

5. Stick the ends to the two different hand shaped pieces and wait for it to stick on firmly before opening and closing it. 

Original idea taken from here.

5. Cook a Fantabulous Feast for Mommy!

YES!! Cook something for her. Just, don't bake unless you have experience, because it takes a lot more time and there is a higher chance of burning something you're trying to bake than something you're cooking. 

Cook something special for her. Or cook her favourite dish! Or cook with her. That's a special kind of bonding right there. 

Make her breakfast in bed. Rope in your dad for some extra help. Additional points if it's your first time cooking. But please put safety first and have someone oversee you or help you if it's your first time.

6. If you're in Singapore...

Here are a few discounts available for Mother's Day:

• Courts is having a special offer for Mother's Day. Just key in the promotional code LOVEMOM when purchasing products from the following categories:
• Flowers 
• Perfumes
• Jewellery
• Bags
• Yoga & Pilates
• Personal Care
• Bakeware

 I didn't know Courts had these categories either. Tomorrow (10 May 2015) is the last day for this promotion. 

• Visit http://book.hungrygowhere.com/mothersday-2015 for awesome dining deals. There are deals for different budgets. 

• Resorts World Sentosa - One mother dines free with a minimum of 3 other pax. 

I hope these last minute ideas serve you well, loving fathers and children. Share these with others still fumbling for ideas and make more mothers happier around the world :)

So this is the second NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Program) technique I learned, and also one of the easiest. I wrote about the first technique I learned, which was the Swish Technique here. I have also written about the 4 basic human emotions that affect our daily routine. You can read that here :)

Now, the second one is called, as the title of this post suggests, the BOMBING technique.

Yes, this one's as simple as the name suggests. That is, you bomb people / things / situations.. In your head. Live the dream of a terrorist.. In your head.

I repeat, In Your Head.

Meaning, you imagine it. Safe as that :)

Basically, this technique helps you overcome anger towards anyone, anything or any situation which has affected you in the past or is affecting you right now.

As we all know, stress is at an all time high around the globe these days, and Stress leads to Anger.

You find yourself angry at your child, partner, boss, random people on a packed train or bus, cats, dogs, food...the list just goes on. You're basically not happy. You're frustrated and you don't know why, and you have no reasonable avenue to vent your anger when you don't know why you're angry in the first place.

How do you do it?

Say you're angry with your boss, or your parents; just imagine them in front of you.

Imagine a situation you had with them where they really hurt you with their words or actions.

Relive it in your head, and then you throw an imaginary bomb at them. Destroy them! Destroy everything.

Do it as many times as you want, and you can feel the anger slowly dissipating. 

Again, as explained in my article about the Swish technique, do it only for as long as you feel comfortable.

If your anger doesn't seem to be subsiding then stop, take a look around your surroundings, bring yourself and your mind back to reality and then try again. 

Tips: 

1. Don't push yourself too hard. This is supposed to relieve your stress not stress you up even more. 

2. If you've been trying for quite a while, then take a break. Go take a walk and walk it off. 

3. If at first you don't succeed, don't get fed up. Some people may not get it in the first try. So be patient with yourself and try again after a while. 

4. If you're having a lot of difficulty then I suggest you consult a professional who can coach you. That way you can apply this technique better and get better results. 

If you think this is not your thing, then do stay tuned to know about 3 more techniques that I learned. 

They sure helped me get a hold on my anxiety and I can positively say that I'm about 90% free of it now. I hardly ever get emotional or cry. I'm able to make better decisions because my emotions aren't getting in the way. 

Do take note that I am not a professional and I'm only sharing my experiences and what I learned, here. If you feel like you need someone to confide in and seek advice or therapy, and think the psychologist I consulted can help you, do contact me and I'll share his details with you. 

Wish you an anger-free life! 

This article (written by me) was first published in Pravasi Express. This is a four part article.

Consider this: 

You are a parent of a teenager. You were brought up in India, and you came to Singapore following a great job opportunity with which you can provide a better life for your family, and maybe even for your parents back in India. 

Everything is going well and smooth like you planned, until your child becomes a teenager and starts secondary education here. One day, out of the blue, you feel like your teenager has changed. All of a sudden, your world has been turned upside down because you feel like he or she is no longer the innocent child that you still considered them to be. 

Maybe they have started talking back. Or showing you bad attitude, sometimes even questioning your authority. He or she starts to constantly complain that he or she is being misunderstood or that you are not trying to understand them. Something just doesn’t feel right. You feel disconnected with your teenager. You feel helpless. You are worried. 

Does any of this sound familiar to you? 

If it does, you are not alone. 

Don’t worry, you are not a bad parent. Neither is this a situation that you cannot resolve. These are things that most parents of teenagers face. If you are a parent and have a teenager who is not giving you trouble like those stated above, then consider yourself lucky - either you have a very understanding teenager, or you have gone out of your way to take the effort to understand your teenager and bridge the generation and cultural gap. 

Yes, the keyword here is “Understanding”. 

While as a parent you may feel stressed up and worried about your teenager’s behaviour, there is a very important factor that you may be overlooking. Your teenager is facing the same predicament as you are. 

They are growing up in the Singapore culture, which is unfamiliar to them just as much as it is unfamiliar to you. 

Growing up in Singapore has its fair share of difficulties for children. As someone who was not brought up in Singapore, you may not be able to relate to it, because you do not know what student life in Singapore holds for teenagers here. 

“What could be so different from the student life in India?” 

This is a common question that pops up in many parents’ minds.

In order to answer this, let me just put forward a few simple questions which you may hopefully be able to relate to: 

1. Is there a difference in the office and work culture between India and Singapore?
2. Is there a difference in the general public culture between India and Singapore?
3. Do you feel stressed up at your workplace, or feel out of place at least once during your stay in Singapore?

If your answer is yes to at least one of these questions, then the answer to the question asked earlier regarding the difference in student life, is also a resounding yes.

Just as you may find it difficult to fit in to life here or the pace at your workplace, your teenager may also find it difficult to cope with studies and student life here. 

This leads to frustration, but your teenager does not know who to turn to for advice. 

“Why? We parents are always here for them, right?”

This is another question that many people have. But think of it from your child’s point of view. 

Your child knows that you were not brought up here. Hence, he or she automatically deduces that you are unfamiliar with the problem that they are facing and therefore you cannot provide them with a viable solution. 

Can you blame them if they feel this way? Many a times, when you have a problem, you choose not to share it with a person who does not have experience facing and resolving the same (or at least similar) problem, don’t you?  

If you, as an adult think this way, then imagine the thought process of a teenager, who has much less life experience and is surrounded by a lot of emotional and psychological pressure in the Singapore lifestyle. Sometimes, teenagers do not approach adults for help with solving an issue simply because they are afraid of getting scolded or upsetting you. 

For teenagers with parents who are not brought up here, life at home is very different from the life they face at school. They face a constant clash in cultural differences as they transit between home and school. It is a culture shock that many youngsters find difficult to adjust and adapt to. Some children may never be able to adapt at all, and this combined with the feeling that their parents do not understand them can have a lasting negative impact. 

Teenagers always yearn to be accepted by their peers. In this case, their peers are most often Singaporean children, born and brought up in the Singapore lifestyle.

What is this Singapore lifestyle?

The answer for this question can be summed up in one word: Freedom. There is freedom for everyone to do what they please. There is freedom to explore the unknown, and learn about things that they are curious about. As a modern nation with 24 hour amenities, night activities are common things. Get togethers and outings are different from what you are used to. Student-Teacher relationships are different, and so is friendship. 

While parents like you are concerned and protective of your child, showering them with care and love, parents here are not so protective. Most of them give their child the space to explore and learn from their mistakes, while just keeping a lookout for them, so that they do not make serious, unethical mistakes.

For this, understanding and trust is very important.   

As a parent - or rather, an adult - there is only one way to reach out to children and teenagers. You have to go down to their level of maturity and think with their mindset. You should never expect them to come up to your level and think with the maturity of an adult. Constantly calling them immature because their actions are immature when you look at a situation from the adult point of view can throw them off and make them very confused. 

This is because, as mentioned earlier, they are just growing up, and have much less experience in life than you do. The maturity and wiseness that you have as an adult was developed from the many experiences you have had in life - both good and bad. 

The kids are still learning. You were once a child and a teenager, before you became the adult that you are now, and that is the reason why it is possible for you to imagine yourself as a teenager in the current society and align your thought process with theirs, even for a little while. 

Children, however, have always been children for their whole lives. They do not have even the slightest idea of how it feels like to be an adult. So how can parents expect their teenagers to think like adults?

Besides, as we all have felt when we were young, they also can’t wait to become an adult, and all that they are doing now, is trying to act like they are an adult. They are trying to believe that they know what life is about. We, as adults, now know it is foolish, but the truth of the matter is that this is a learning process - for them as well as for us. 

Education, as we know plays a major role in defining who we are and what we will become in the future. It doesn’t always have to be the things we study from educational institutions, but every bit of good knowledge is crucial and will help us in our life in one way or another. 

There is a saying, “No other investment has such a lasting effect as the education of children. Children who go to school are healthier, more self-assured and can more easily assume a profession”. So education should be made mandatory for each and every child for their well being and for a healthy future. 

Another thing about education is that it shouldn’t be forced onto a person, it should be willingly accepted. Without that acceptance, education doesn’t serve it's purpose. 

India, home to more than 1.2 billion people and counting, is rather known for a very strange and bizarre practice which has happening for quite a while. It is not seen anywhere else in this world. When you are done with your high school studies and waiting for your results, you have relatives and family friends coming from all over, even those whom you have never seen in your life, and saying: “ DONE WITH HIGH SCHOOL RIGHT? GO FOR ENGINEERING. IT’S THE FIELD WITH MOST HOPE!!!" 

And there starts your misery! 

In a country which has the most number of highest and lowest educated people in the world, a very limited number of children make it till high school and go beyond for further education without any hindrance. Whenever a child passes high school, there starts the family's dilemma and at the right time enters many known and unknown people giving all sorts of advices and suggestions, which always, sadly, ends in ENGINEERING!

So the child is pressurized and then gets pushed into a whirlpool. Putting up a fight in the beginning and later understanding the fact that there is no fighting it, the child finally have to give up and go with the flow. 

Then, starts the most miserable four years of his or her life. My life was no different. 

Born in an average family, I was educated a very good school. In my lower elementary classes, I remember teachers asking, “who do you want to be when you grow up?”. I remember my friends saying football player, astronaut, soldier etc. 

Mine was to be a pilot because I was always fascinated with flying. Years later, even though my ambitions changed, my academic grades remained consistent. In the 10th standard board exams, I scored very high marks. 

But then, I got lazy in my 11th grade and I somehow managed just to pass. Then came the final year of high school - the deciding year, on what your real goal in life is and to pursue it in the years to follow. But I was faced with much worse problems. I was affected by a rare medical issue and I was struggling with its treatment for 3 months and was totally depressed about how I could manage to write my final exams. 

Against all odds, ignoring all the possibility of failure, I worked hard day and night and attended my final exams and scored excellent grades. 

The happiness, however, was short-lived. 

The biggest question in my life hit me - WHAT NEXT? 

While I was down with treatment, all my friends were planning their future. I was left clueless. There were debates within the family on the courses I could go for. A sudden decision was finally made based on opinions from other's suggestions as I was without one of my own. 

There I was, with the only option left - to join engineering. 

In most cases parents don’t even think of asking what their child aspires to be in life and simply make their kid walk a path that they feel is best for them. That is the most gruesome thing one can do to their child who has dreams and ambitions about his/her future but is helpless to speak about it. 

As I was depressed and clueless on my goal back then, the only thing I could do was agree with my parents' decision and go with them to the place that I will be regretting for the next four years of my life. 

Classes commenced a month later. I was in a totally different atmosphere there, trying to mingle with people I've never seen or talked to ever in my life. I felt like a penguin in a group of African grey parrots struggling to fit in. It went on like that for several days till I made some good friends. But as the classes went on full swing, my head started feeling like a pressure cooker kept inside a microwave which was about to burst! 

I was totally feeling out of place, left with no choice but to endure it. After finishing the 1st year exams, I really grew more and more conscious about my passion for photography. But by then it was really late. I flunked my exams, big time. So there was no turning back. I was literally suffocating like a fish out of water, the more I realised I was in a place I didn’t fit in. Bearing my parents' faces and expectations in mind, I had to keep my interests and passions aside and bear this headache called engineering. 

After four years of  hardship, here I am one among the millions of jobless engineers in the country who are facing constant criticisms from family and relatives and bearing the burden of expectations on my shoulders. Now I am forced to look up a job that doesn’t even have any relation to what I studied and spend the rest of my life working within four walls to earn a living. This is not just my story. It’s the life story of many people out there whose dreams were sacrificed so that their parents could call their child an engineer. 

The main reasons for such a weird trend  is because 

• Parents don’t trust their children to take risks in life by doing something new. They always choose the easy way. 
• They prefer to follow someone rather than make their own way. 
• Lack of proper carrier guidance. 
• Countless number of engineering collages make things much easier for parents to blindly choose that field rather than look for something different. 
• Lack of knowledge about other opportunities. 
• Jobless and ignorant people giving unwanted suggestions and advice to innocent parents who don’t have much knowledge about the opportunities that are available outside. 

To every parent out there who are planning on sending your son or daughter for engineering, here are some information I would like to share:

1. On an average, more than 1.5 million engineering graduates pass out every year in our country (India) of which about a million are jobless. Among the ones getting placements, only 20% get good pay. The rest work for so little salary that they won't be able to survive 2 weeks with a family in that income. 
2. The sad truth is that even after knowing all these facts, parents still line up at engineering collages with donations for admissions for their child. So next time before you listen to others' suggestions and advice, go to your child and spend time with your child to know his / her interests and motivate them to pursue their dreams. Or else your child will end up like millions of other children who dreamt about flying, but whose wings got clipped even before they tried flapping it. 

Todays children are the ones who plays the major role in reshaping the future and face of our country with new innovations and talents. So next time when someone walks up to a parent and ask “why didn’t you send your child for engineering?”, they should proudly say, “I didn’t, because I let my child follow his / her dreams”! 

At the end of the day, a secured future is what every parent want for their child. Parents can be proud of themselves for raising an amazing kid and letting their child follow his / her own path towards their success, rather than pushing them off a cliff into something they aren't even vaguely interested in.

Read more articles by Abhiram Nair