Originally published on Aug 28, 2017.
1. Last August 19, Mae and I went up to Tagaytay to attend a friend’s wedding followed by a staycation for our 2nd wedding anniversary. (For additional context, Mae was also already 7-months pregnant at this time).
Upon arriving at the hotel, the guard was signaling to me to make sure the car was parked straight. He also had the facial expression as if he wanted to know why we were there.
So I lowered down the window, and while trying park at the same time, I ended up so eloquently saying, “Ummm.. dito po matutulog.” (Uhhh. We will sleep here).
He then professionally replied, “Oh, for check in sir? Right this way”.
2. Upon seeing our hotel room we saw that we had chosen the right place to stay. There were rose petals at the bed, towels folded into swans with their heads forming a heart. There was also a welcome chocolate cake! It was the works!
But what impressed me the most was their greeting banner that read: “Happy Anniversary Mr and Mrs. Patino”.
It brought back so many memories of grade-school projects.
The banner was made out of 6 bond papers, scotched-taped together. They even used the classic designs of MS Word Art1. That’s how you know it was a real labor of love from the hotel.
3. We enjoyed our stay at the hotel. Unfortunately on the way down, Mae was experiencing stomach aches. So we decided to go to the Hospital ER to make sure everything was alright with the pregancy. We were thinking that it was just going to be a short side trip before going home.
I dropped Mae off, so she could get processed, while I was to follow after I had parked the car. Rushing back to the ER, I couldn’t find Mae.
So I once again eloquently asked the ER personnel… “Umm may buntis po na kakapasok lang. Masakit po yung tiyan. Saan po siya?” (“There was a pregnant woman who walked in with a tummy ache. Where is she?”
4. Thankfully there were no other pregnant women in the ER who had stomach pains so they understood who I was talking about!
They told me that she had been taken to the Genesis Center. On the way there, I was seeing “birthing rooms”. Seeing this made me worry.
It was then found out that Mae was already experiencing regular contractions, and 2cm dilated. Our 7-month old baby wants to check out early!
It was with that diagnosis that we were immediately admitted into the hospital.
Thankfully, we never bothered to repack our stuff all the way from Singapore. In the car were lots of clothes to last us for a full week.
I unloaded our bags into our hospital room and so our staycation continues…
Footnotes:
1 – MS WordArt – in the early 2000s Microsoft Office released this feature that let you have special fonts and designs for banners. It looked great back then, but now (2016) it’s tacky.