New Baby Boy!!!

Last thursday, Sal and and went to visit our friend Wandi at her house in a nice village in Congressional avenue. Sally fetched me from nail loft at around 7pm, afer my manicure. There is a chinese custom, that after giving birth, the mother is to go through "ge-lai" to help her recover from the strains of giving birth and be in proper health condition for taking care of and nursing the baby. I have seen several of my married friends go through it and believe it or not, the new mom is not allowed to take a bath for about a month I think! Depends on the practice in the family. She is to eat a lot of oily food. Food fried in sesame oil. Sal and I decided to bring her cake--cake is fatty and sweet and will make Wandi happy! hahahaha We went to Alex III bakeshop located in Tomas Morato, where Icings bakeshop used to stand. I like the chocolate cake at their resto so I presumed they make good cakes and pastries. It was funny that the famous Alex III chocolate cake was no where insight. They offered muffins, ensaymadas, breads, cookies and an array of cakes. What was interesting were their different varieties of sans rival. They had the conventional sans rival, mocha sans rival, choco san rival etc... The best seller was the TORTA DELA ROSA (or DELO ROSO??--i'm confused) which was the chocolate version. We didn't get a chance to try it, so we just took their word for it and got the medium sized one.

We got to Wandi's house around 830pm. She looked so cute in her pajamas...and the baby......sooooo adorable =) The baby weighed 5 lbs at birth, so he looked quite fragile. His skin was still pinkish and flaky due to skin shedding. We spent the night talking about pregnancy, giving birth, breast feeding, rearing kids and all the motherhood enchillada. Congratulations Wandi!

After that, it occurred to us that we haven't had dinner yet. So we scouted the vicinity outside the village to find a place to eat. We chose to have our late dinner at Jo's Inato. We tried their famous chicken inato--which was like chicken inasal minus the yellow coloring and chicken oil. I thought that inato is the same as insal..but the waiters told me otherwise. As far as taste is concerned, its almost the same to me...like good ol' filipino style chicken barbeque! hehehehe We also had the laing. It resembled the tinomok of Jerry's, with which the gabi leaves are stuffed with a meatball like filling. It was delicious and great with our chicken.

I am not able to post pictures for the time being...but I do have the photos..I'll post them another day =)