Dylan's 5th Birthday

March is always a busy year.  Especially when you have to deal with graduations and moving up ceremonies.  It's doubly exciting for us since the kids both celebrate their birthdays in the same month.  Granted, it can also be cheaper since you only have to celebrate once, which at this point in their lives, they don't mind hahaha


So anyway, we didn't have a celebration planned for Dylan.  We figured, since he's going to his Moving Up ceremony on the 22nd anyway, we'd celebrate then and make it a double celebration (jeez, reading back, that's a lot of "celebration" words hehe).  Thanks to Ate Den and Kuya Erghie Dylan had his first gift of the day. :)  He got two workbooks :) What we wanted was to buy a bike for Dylan.  He finally figured out how to ride his small bike - before he used to pedal his feet on the ground instead of driving the pedals themselves. We thought about where to buy a good, quality bike.  We've learned our lesson with Dana's bike which we bought from a mall.  It broke down so fast, it stayed in the storage far longer than Dana was able to use it.

This time, we headed to the bike lane in Quiapo where we were able to buy Dylan's bike at a much cheaper price but it's a far better quality than that of Dana's.  We had to walk the length of the avenue to get a feel for what's available.  It was very hot but the corn and the green mangoes made it all worthwhile :) There were cheap bikes, there were expensive bikes.  Some bikes looked like old stock.  Some looked new.  Others looked rickety, others looked really sporty.

We found the best deal at King's Bicycle shop where the sales assistant was helpful without being too forceful. That quality to me is as important as the cost of the bike :D  It was slightly more expensive than in other stores but we thought that their quality was good considering the number of customers currently in the store and actually buying stuff from them.  Before we actually finalized the sale, we went over to the Globe Lumpia store in Raon!  It's such great tasting lumpia and cheap too!  We bought a lot for our lunch for when we get back home.  

We went back to King's Bicycle and bought Dylan's Spiderman bike.  We had to wait a while for the technician to assemble the bike too.  We kept ourselves occupied by admiring all the bike parts.  One caught Patrick's eye - it was a Cannondale bike frame that was so light you can pick it up with one hand.  But the price blew us away! It cost P60,000 (roughly $1400) enough for Dana's 2 years of education LOL We just took a cab to get home.

That same day, we also took Dana's bike to the shop near the house.  It turned out, the sprockets needed to be replaced and Patrick also bought bells which he affixed to the kids' bikes :)  Needless to say, we were all singing to Queen's "I want to ride my bicycle" throughout the day.  

As a treat, that Saturday, we all trooped to the Quezon Memorial Circle so that the kids will have the freedom to enjoy riding their bikes.  It's kind of hampering them having to just circle around the living room at home Den and Erghie also came with us.  We had to remove Dana's bike balancers to get her accustomed to riding, which at first made her really mad and frustrated :)  But all in all, it was a good day.  We rounded off everything with a trip to JT's Manukan Grille for lunch :)