As a mother to 12-year-old twins Giulia and Giovanni, she can’t get any cooler.
Shortly after she gave birth, she and her Italian husband Luciano built a crawling tract around their bed. This was to facilitate their newborns’ capability to crawl around freely. Result? At five days old, the babies could already incredibly crawl up to six feet.
"Since they were babies, I equipped them to survive. I did not supervise them closely. I just baby-proofed the house then left them to explore," she recalls.
"Usually parents kill the instincts," she adds. Panicky fits and paranoia stop them from letting the children discover the world on their own.
For Dr. Rebecca, whose babies could already walk at 10 months and bravely climb the stairs at one year, it is important to train the motor intelligence at a very early age. "My children never had a bukol," Dr. Rebecca beams, countering other people’s belief that her training poses physical danger to the kids.
"Motor intelligence translates to brain intelligence," Dr. Rebecca quips. It is an apt explanation why her son is excellent at anything: music, arts, computer and sports. Or why her daughter was courageous enough to leave her and move to Italy with her dad for a lesson in independence. In Italy, her Julia Roberts-look-a-like daughter is the only one in her class who does the laundry, cleans the house and washes the dishes. Giulia told her: "Mom, I am so lucky. I have an ambition in life. To help the poor."
Of course, Dr. Rebecca misses going to the ballet with Giulia and tagging her everywhere she goes but she makes sure they still go for mother-daughter bonding, distance notwithstanding. "As a mother, I’m dedicated. Even if my daughter is in Italy, she tells me how I create a big impact on her. I am still able to process her from the distance because I talk to her every day."
Dr. Rebecca and Giovanni always look forward to their month-long summer trip to Italy for the family reunion. Until then, they have a field day playing golf together and sleeping in the same bedroom so they share stories before bedtime.
Yes, she is in the miraculous field of delivering new babies to the world, but she herself has brought up two human beings who are nothing short of amazing. – Samantha Echavez