Visiting Jane in Tung Chung

L-R: Ninong Soy, Mommy Jane, Baby Joaquin, and Ninang Missy

I love spending time with babies. I like holding them, staring at them, smelling them, talking to them, and touching them. They are so sweet and trusting and gentle (well, most of them are!) and many other very good things. When my sister Rita Geli gave birth to her daughter Rei, the mood in our household changed. I was only her aunt but I, myself, would leave work exactly at six in the evening in the hope of catching her awake even for just a few minutes. More often that not, I would get stuck in a horrendous traffic jam in Edsa and, by the time I got home, she will be fast asleep. But, I kept trying because with my little niece waiting at home, it was so easy to put my workaholic lifestyle on hold for awhile.

Today, my good friend Soy Agra and I decided to trek (in HK, a trip that involves more than a 15-minute train/bus/cab ride is considered quite a long one --- It's like driving from QC to Tagaytay!) to Tung Chung to visit our friend Jane Feliciano and her six-week old baby Lewis Joaquin. Soy and I met at the new Elements Mall in Kowloon Station. We walked around to get a feel of the place. It is like Pacific Place. We had a quick lunch of noodles at 360. And then, we got on the Tung Chung Line for the half-hour journey to Tung Chung. In TC, we hopped on a cab for another five-minute drive to Carribean Coast when Jane and Joaquin live.

When we got there, little Joaquin was fast asleep. He is such a good baby. He did not even cry the whole afternoon. After a couple of hours, we woke him up only to watch him slip slowly back into sleep again. But during his short waking moments, we enjoyed talking to him. He was making little sounds and smiling. He especially liked to smile and look at his mom. Babies know who their moms are! Isn't that amazing? Well, I did insist on holding him for awhile following super-model Iman's advice. In Africa, they say that if a woman has difficulty conceiving, she needs only to hold someone else's baby for 24 hours and she will get pregnant. She swears by it. She and her now hubby of 13 years David Bowie had a hard time getting pregnant. One day she was on a shoot and Christie Brinkley was there with her baby. Iman held the baby in her arms for a day. And voila, one month later, she was happily pregnant. It's a story of hope. I am not planning on getting pregnant just yet, but there is no harm in front-loading all that luck. And for the wannabe mom's out there, Baby Joaquin is just a train ride away!