The Princess Birthday

Anna celebrated her 26th birthday last March 6 ( I always kid her by pretending her real birthday is the 3rd). She was going to have friends over the next day being a Friday and had asked them to come as their High School frustration. Her friends of various ilks came but nobody was in costume only Anna was, the Prom Queen and she really hammed it up. The party run up to five in the morning the next day and must have been a blast considering the amount of alcohol Anna had available.
What I want to write about is the birthday dinner we had. Since Mikey,Cholo,Gian and Mimay are all working in the Makati area (alright Mai is in Mandaluyong) the decision was to go to GB5 and eat at Pia and Padre Damaso. As usual Cholo was our vanguard but the place was full and he did not want to eat out in the terrace. We decided to go La Maison although I had apprehensions because word of mouth was not positive about the food.

However the word of mouth was wrong we had an enjoyable dinner starting with buffalo wings and some baked oysters some good soup before proceeding to try their barkada plates of a sampler of their meats and fish dishes. Three of us started with the appetizers (Anna,Cholo and myself) Javier came a little bit later and Gian arrived shortly. Mikey who knocked off from his DJ slot at 8pm came in while we were already eating dinner and he ordered another plate of the buffalo wings after trying the last one on the plate on the table. As usual Mai because of the long hours they put in at Globe Telecom arrived when we were ready to go for dessert.

Oh I must mention that service at La Maison was chaotic, there were so many trainees who were probably on their first day because they did not know what their food was. And service was free lance, it seemed that waiters were not assigned definite zones. Anyway we decided to go for dessert somewhere else.

And desert was going to be at Pia and Padre Damaso where we found out Pia was the mother of Maria Clara. Anna ordered four dessert plates tone of the luscious Sisa's Dementia a truffle cake with dark chocolate, two plates of the Benzayb banana cake and an apple crumble . What was funny was since Anna wanted to blow a birthday candle she asked our waiter for one. it looked like they only had one candle in the place because the waiter took it back immediately.
Cholo and Gian had Belgian hot chocolate and the five of them were having fun with how Cholo looked like with chocolate on his teeth.

This is when I realized again that my four children and the two children of Bebeng ( Marlene's brother no 2) were really siblings and shared a world of their own. Having grown up basically together they had their stories, a secret language of their own that oftentimes I cannot fathom and I felt like I was watching a reality show. There was a twinge of envy because I grew up apart from my immediate siblings and although we shared childhood memories our teenage worlds diverged because I got to college so quickly. It was only when we were adults with Ricky and Jaime living in the US where I realized they were two of my best friends. Best friends because we were all full of hot air and knew it.

At the end of the day I felt so blessed because instead of four children I really had six and they liked each other a lot. Happy Birthday Anna!!!