I’ve never been this fit in my life. I never would have thought I’d find myself being strongest at 32 years old with 2 kids. But I guess it makes sense:

• Play with my boys a lot.
• Changed up my eating habits since what I eat is passed through breastfeeding
• Found a workout routine that actually works for me!

I went through loving and hating my body in college and beyond. I tried to lose pounds quickly by following fad diets, and throughout all of these trends, nothing ever quite stuck.

I finally “cracked the code” when I found the right answer to “WHY?”

College me:

Why am I doing this? So that I can lose weight. Why? So I can look good. Why? So people won’t have anything bad to say about me. Why? Because people can be mean. Why? Because… Ewan. Labo.

So, gets niyo ba… Most of the time nababalik ako sa “eh bahala sila wala akong pake!!” so I’ll just binge eat and hello di ako magwoworkout for evil people noh!! LOL.

Me now:

Why am I doing this? Because I want to get fit. Why? So I can play with my kids. Why? Because I love them. Gets.

I’m grateful that my kids keep me motivated. Pancho and Vito are 14 and 12.5 kilos respectively and they LOVE being carried!

A lot of the time, when I’m carrying Pancho, Vito will run to me and demand to be carried too. I don’t do it too much though – my poor back!! But OMG how can you resist these two??

I got a message from Coach Andre of Fitnessmobil some time in May while in quarantine. At the start of the lockdown, I was doing yoga a lot but I somehow stopped for a month when I got his message. It was an invitation to try a one-on-one personal training session via Zoom. Weird, right? But I gave it a shot and since then, I haven’t skipped a workout.

We train virtually twice a week and it’s just been the best decision I made to reply to that message I got. Coach Andre is such a professional and straight to the point which is exactly what I like in a trainer. He explains why the moves are important and why bending my knees just ever so slightly will make a huge difference in the effectivity of the move.

I feel like my whole journey fitness should get a different blog post lol. Consider this an intro, I guess.

If you’re curious about Fitnessmobil, you can contact them thru Instagram. Jim and I are also offering a free Work Out With Jim & Saab session for our patrons HAHA it’s this Saturday, January 9. If you haven’t already signed up on Patreon, click here and get the perks while contributing to charity! We’ve got a lot of surprises lined up for this month 🙂

This is the third of my top nine moments of 2020. Here’s a list of the past ones I wrote about in this series:

• Dolomite Snow
• Birthday Farm Trip

Even with all the precautionary measures Jim and I normally take, we decided early on to really lock down our household since we wanted to be able to see our parents without any fears.

We are especially careful when seeing Jim’s parents because they are seniors and highly susceptible to COVID-19. Thankfully, as you may have read from my last post, our family trip to our farm in November was very successful. We had such a great time that we daydreamed about getting to host our best friends there someday.

It took a lot of back and forth but we eventually decided to do it! We were able to do it under the strictest guidelines and reassurance that everyone involved was taking everyone’s safety seriously.

Step 1: Quarantine

No matter how many swab tests you take, kung lumalabas ka pa at gumigimik, you might as well just save your money. We read up on it and apparently, if you take a test but you were out and about a few days prior, there’s a likely chance that your results will become a false negative. This is why we all stayed home (and didn’t make any close contact with anybody in our separate households who regularly goes out) at least 5 days before taking our swab tests.

Step 2: Testing

The golden standard for swab testing is RT-PCR pero ginto rin ang halaga. The most affordable option is the antibody rapid blood testing but I don’t think anybody does that anymore since it’s unreliable. We got the antigen swab testing which is highly accurate especially if you stay put days before your scheduled test. We separately scheduled drive-thru testing in Cubao via Hero Laboratories — Don’t be shocked if you see my face on their website, they asked me for a testimonial and I didn’t expect them to put my huge face (and Puddy’s cute face!) on the landing page!! Hahahaha! Ngayon ko lang nakita!!

Step 3: Squeezing Everything In Our Cars

We brought ALL of our music gear and equipment for band practice, free jams, even rough recordings. Kyle packed almost all of his millions (lol) of camera equipment so we could shoot stuff. Candy and Steven brought tooons of food because they were in charge of feeding all of us. And it was, by the way, amazing. If you wanna try Steven’s pecan pie (AND YOU SHOULD) head on over to @silvapies on Instagram.

Step 4: Interact

Man, it was pretty awkward especially at first. We all still wore our face masks inside the 3 vehicles we rode going to the farm. So when we finally got there and saw each other, it was a mixture of OMG I MISSED YOU GUYS SO MUCH HUHU COME HERE and OMG I DON’T THINK WE SHOULD HUG GET AWAY FROM ME??

But the trip made it apparent to everyone that we really are family. It was like a high school retreat and we jammed nine months worth of creative projects into 2 days. All in all, we made 3 entirely new songs and 2 music videos – both of which were conceptualized, and brainstormed up until the very last minute.

Sharing some more photos of our magical trip

Glad we were able to see each other – hoping it won’t have to take another nine months before we do it again. I’m well aware that not everybody has the luxury to do the same thing with their best friends and in no way do I encourage you to do the same but I don’t want to be a hypocrite and tell you not to carefully plan something like this. If anything, I want to remind you to stay vigilant and don’t trust even your closest friends kasi minsan lumalabas pa rin yung iba so wag niyo na muna silang isama!! LOL! Stay safe, everyone!

P.S. All photos shot on film by Kyle Quismundo and Manny Tanglao

I’m not even going to bother trying to get my Top Nine posts on Instagram, I know it’ll just be a grid of Pancho and Vito photos. Haha. So what I’ll do instead is try to look back on the globally horrible year that was and pick out the nicest moments I can think of.

It’s hard not to cringe when I get ~Biver~ messages from well-meaning titas and titos about how 2020 was actually the best year because we learned to overcome it/be resilient/etc. Ack. And what about those who lost their livelihoods and their loved ones? 🙁

Once again, I remind myself that these people mean well and just want to deliver a message of hope. With this blog post, I hope to do the same without seeming tone-deaf. I fully acknowledge that 2020 WAS A SHIT YEAR. But I also know that horrible things can and will continue to happen regardless of the 4-digit number we write down after each month and day. At the same time, meaningful moments will also always happen especially if you look out for them.

A year is just a parentheses enclosing a collection of moments within a twelve-month period. Closing that parentheses last night felt like we finally caught our breath after a very long-winded run-on sentence that didn’t make sense at all!!

As we open a new parentheses for 2021, I’d like to pick out key moments in the previous one that still made sense – at least for me.

Here’s the first one:

DOLOMITE SNOW: A Wake Up With Jim & Saab Christmas Station ID

It’s our third year celebrating Christmas with our Wake Up With Jim & Saab podcast listeners and we thought of creating a station ID because… I don’t know either… That’s just the kind of thing we do, I guess. LOL. It was Jim’s brilliant idea to make one and we wrote the song that same night, had our best friend Candy “Voice Of An Angel” Gamos (lol) record it, asked our Patreon podkids to send in some video clips, and shot some awkward footage during our Cheats farm trip (that’s another key moment!!).

The chorus goes:

This Christmas, gumising na tayo /

This pasko, mag-Wake Up na tayo /

Even if mabagsakan ng Dolomite Snow /

Mag-mañanita pa rin tayo /

`Di maka-canceledt ating pasko.

Sheer poetry… *chef’s kiss*

Another notable line and its ~Genius.com~ annotations:

Nandyan Snow, Barat yan pala

John Snow… Baratheon pala… Jim thought of this. Makes no sense but, damn, it’s good wordplay, I guess.

This station ID was aired during our Podkids Paskuhan virtual Christmas party and it was received very well hahaha. Of course the Christmas party is part of my highlights too especially since some of my faves graced the event with their video greetings.

These are just a few people you can expect to guest on the show for the new year! Woohoo!

Check back tomorrow as I share another one of my Top Nine moments of 2020!

P.S. Check out what the critics are saying about Dolomite Snow: