New Territory for Hogar de Amor II

I am so pleased to announce that after over a year of searching and searching and searching some more, HDA II finally has new stomping ground!! Very exciting! And good timing since my chief searchers (my parents) are making plans to head back to the states.

This morning was definitely exciting. We turned what would normally be a slightly dull contract signing meeting into a whole special excursion. Twenty-five + babies, toddlers, and young children will do that! It wasn't supposed to be quite that way, but what can I say--everyone we invited showed up to come and more!

Let's see....

Alseth family of HDA III (6 people)
Long-time volunteer David
repeat volunteer Elizabeth
me and my Dad
3 caregivers
administrator and family (3 people)
25 HDA kids

And...4 vehicles!




And here it is!! Our new house to rent!

(Note: these pictures were taken more to capture the kids' first moments there rather than to show off the house, besides that I was slightly distracted by all the activity and by meeting the original owner's son who is the current owner and talking about the contract and other details, so I suppose there will be lots more pictures later as we start cleaning it up and moving in.)

Toddlers from the Baby Home inspecting the large beautiful kitchen:


The (dry) pool was a big hit:

They certainly wasted no time getting in!

If it was this much fun without water....


The girls checking out their curtains:


Some of the girls peering out from their balcony (they'll have the whole top floor, a suite):

A picture off the balcony towards the back (we need to fix up the little house--newly accepted volunteer Sarah, that's your room!!):


Merely by the proportion of pictures taken outside versus inside, you can tell that the beauty of this place for us is it's spacious outdoors and "country feel" (which is the biggest improvement over their current house). I'd bet that we have more cows and chickens for neighbors than people, which the kids love, as you can see by the following conversation:

Overheard between caregivers and children while chatting on the upstairs balcony

"Tias, we want a dog! Please, please, we want a dog!!"

"Hm....dogs are a lot of work, do you want that?"

"Okay we want a cat, please, a cat!"

"No, cats bring sicknesses"

(children thinking) "Okay, then an elephant!" (and this in all seriousness)

Tias: laughter

(children thinking again) "I know! I know! We could have HORSES!"

At that point I give my two cents by suggesting we go back to the dog idea. =)

We'd appreciate prayer as we move forward from here. We'll need abundant wisdom and creativity for all of the organizing, changes, and decisions ahead! A big one looming is obviously when we will move out/move in. We have our current place till January 31, a visiting photographer to plan around January 23-26, but for security reasons someone needs to be living in the house starting Monday when we get the keys.

So I had hoped to move them over starting January 27 but it might need to be sooner, depending on when we can fence in the pool and make some other safety improvements. We've never moved HDA II so this is going to be interesting....

Well that's it for now. I'm really tired. Within 24 hours I was part of not one but THREE mega-outings with kids: the one described here, a trip to an ice cream place with 6 toddlers and a baby, and taking 9 toddlers/babies to the 1st birthday of one of our former babies. That wouldn't normally be so exhausting but there was loads of other work too (more since two of my main helpers are on vacation), and outings with single babies who eventually get heavy after several hours of dashing around the city. And helping a tia for an hour with 10 babies, although I love all of that. So, hasta mañana!