Around a year ago, Ramil and I had grand plans of celebrating our 1st year as husband and wife. We wanted to go somewhere and celebrate our anniversary by going on a 2nd honeymoon. Unfortunately, this idea wasn’t put into action because of the third person on the way. I was right smack in the middle of my eight month on December 17 and so any wishful thoughts of traveling automatically get scratched. Even my suggestion of a weekend in Tagaytay got vetoed by my dear hubby So I’ve assigned Ramil to come up with something that would pass off as a celebration of sorts.

Having heard a horror story from one of our ninangs about her husband forgetting their 1st year anniversary and being the realistic me, I wasn’t expecting surprises or anything like that. I told Ramil that a dinner at some nice place would be good enough for us for this year. We’ve wanted to try the Vivere Skyline at Vivere Suites for a long time now but we never had the time and chance to go there. So Plan A was set… a nice dinner at this fancy place. Ramil, however, (being the driver) brought up the issue of the distance. We live in Rizal and Vivere is located in Alabang… hmmm. He’s not very comfortable with long travel hours for us because I might actually start having contractions anytime and that the long travel might be very uncomfortable for me.

So moving on to Plan B… dinner at Seven Suites, a hotel observatory in Antipolo. We heard that the place has an awesome view of the lights above (stars) and the lights below (city lights). Somewhere in the planning though, I had this urge to just go somewhere to relax. Being very busy, we haven’t cleaned the house in weeks so I told Ramil it would be really great to just go to a place where we can forget about our mess, hehe! The overnight package at Seven Suites that comes with dinner and breakfast was beyond our budget considering that we’ve read mixed reviews on the hotel.

With the holiday season, I know that hotels usually have promos during these times. So we scouted for any hotel that would let us enjoy a mess-free, fully airconditioned hotel room that comes with all the usual nice things like cable-tv, hot water in the showers, etc. for a cheaper price. We ended up booking a room at the Richmonde hotel. They have this holiday promo which is really affordable compared to other hotels we’ve scouted. Basically, we ended up celebrating our anniversary being lazy in our hotel room, malling at Megamall and Podium, and having dinner at Burgoo. Ramil and I haven’t been able to relax like that in such a long time. I must say that it was a perfect way of celebrating our anniversary. After being together for a year, being on our own, doing chores around the house, we totally appreciated 24 hours of being pampered and not caring about anything at all. We now plan to do this more often (if our finances would let us splurge from time to time) especially if we have Mateo at home with us already. I’m pretty sure times like that will seem more precious to us. The stay was also very reminiscent of our wedding day since we stayed at the Linden Suites, a few meters from Richmonde, for our wedding preparations. The night before our wedding, Ramil and I were also malling in Megamall, walking in Ortigas center, enjoying the christmasy feeling in the air, and anticipating the next day. In other words, we did exactly the same things a year after but without the stress (of wedding preparations) and with me walking with less gracefulness and agility because of our little angel inside me.