The Road to 40 Day 87/365: BGC walk and pre-birthday surprise

Vino and I had a chance to walk around the neighborhood to find a place to have dinner with Che on her birthday.

We went hard on Sunday and slept kinda early, but my body clock got me up at 5:30am. Of course, I didn’t need to wake up that early, so I crashed back on the bed. By the time I woke up, Che was ready for work, and I wasn’t able to prepare something for her breakfast.

I did some housekeeping and the blog while waiting for Vino to wake up. I waited on him before preparing breakfast because chances are, he’d have late breakfast and then will have another messed up eating schedule.

As expected, he got up at 11:55am and almost had no plans of getting up. He eventually did, and was about to open a pack of Skittles but I told him he can’t eat sweets before having a proper meal.

We walked to Kiwami, which had a bunch of Japanese restaurants all inside one venue, including Vino’s favorite, Ippudo.

We needed to make a reservation for Che’s actual birthday dinner somewhere. We already tried to scout the places the other day, but we ultimately decided on this Korean spot nearby, called Tang.

It looked like a nice place, smelled like they’re cooking legit Korean food as well. But they weren’t taking reservations, so we needed a different plan, or else we’d be queuing instead of eating on her night.

Vino wanted to go home already, so we walked back to the hotel. We stopped over the supermarket first to get some snacks and juices. He also requested adobo for dinner, so I got some meat for that.

We stopped over a bookstore to get Che a birthday card. I told Vino to write something when we got back to the room.

I gave him the card and a pen and not much else.

Last week, we talked about what gift he wanted to give Che. The process was to think about when does he see his mom at her happiest. He said it’s when she’s with us. Then I asked him where he thinks she is most stressed or down. He said it’s when she works. So I said he must think of something that will help her by combining those two.

His idea was some kind of locket, and I asked him what he thought about the idea of a stress ball. He said that works, and he was already thinking of ways to explain why that would be his gift for her.

After he wrote his message, he was thinking of ways on how to give it to Che. I hid the gift behind the curtain, and when he saw it, he said he had an idea of how to give it to her.

When Che arrived, we had dinner and later, Che had to do some stuff on her laptop. Vino waited patiently and asked me for the right time to give it to her. As soon as I felt Che was done, I told Vino he can go.

He wanted to compose himself because he was very excited about the whole thing. He said he should hide his smile first. He reviewed what he was going to tell Che before going out.

Once he was ready, he went to Che and asked her to play hide and seek with him to “test” his “hiding spot.” She obliged, but of course, the small space didn’t have a lot of hiding spots and it was easy for her to find him.

What she wasn’t prepared for was that he had something for her.

It was a successful surprise. In his letter, he said that he knows that Che is stressed at work, and that the penguin toy will help her. It was soft and fluffy – “like me” he said – so she can have two parts of him when she’s having a hard time at work.

We finished an episode of our current K-Drama and called it a night. With the workload that Che has these past few weeks, and the fact that we went hard Sunday, she needed to rest and it wasn’t ideal to wait for 12am to greet her.

Hopefully, we find a nice place for dinner tomorrow.

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