Ronald MacDonald House

I started this post a while ago, but more pressing things have come up in between and it’s never gotten posted, so I try complete it tonight.

We've been at the Ronald MacDonald House for over week now and I thought I would take a few minutes to introduce our new home. We were quite impressed with the home, as have those who have come to visit us, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to let others out there know what a great service the Ronald MacDonald House is, which only costs $15 per night to stay at. Fortunately it doesn’t need advertising, seeing as it’s so hard to get into in the first place … but hey, if you’re ever looking for a cause to support, we’re all for this one.

The home is six stories. The first two floors are common areas and the top 4 floors are where the rooms are. In total there are 27 families at the RMH. Our room is like a hotel room with two double beds and a bathroom ... a less frilly version of the room on the Ronald MacDonald Website. In our room we also have a small bar fridge since there is very little space in the kitchen fridge for each person. Each room also has a desk and wireless internet connection (when it's working :)

The second floor has the common living areas, with a kitchen, dining area, playroom, lounge, computer room and quiet room.

There are three full kitchens in the big kitchen/dining area. Each room is assigned a kitchen that is theirs mainly to work in. This is a completely workable normal kitchen just like you find at home, and if you can't find something in your kitchen you can search through the other kitchens to see if you can find it. Each room is given three shelves of cupboard space and 1/3 of a fridge shelf. In the kitchen is also two common fridges for everyone to use; in there you'll find donated items (such as milk which is donated weekly) or items leftover from other residents or meals that have been served at the home. All residents are free to use what they want/need from these fridges. As well coffee, tea, sugar and cream are supplied to get us through the “staples”.

Three to four nights of the week groups come in to prepare supper. We have enjoyed several of these nights so far ... lots of good eating!! At the end of the night the leftovers are put in the common fridge, and it doesn't seem that many people eat from there, so there's always plenty of salads and foods in there for us frugal folks to enjoy the next day. A lot of these evenings they also have some sort of entertainment or gift for the kids. The pictures is from one of the evenings they had a pinata ... Rebecca giving it a try.

Almost every day there is some volunteers in the playroom to do crafts or cooking or play with the kids. We are allowed to leave the girls with them, but we must remain in the building. So this does not give us free babysitting time to spend time together at the hospital, but it does allow some quiet time to do some laundry, e-mailing, blogging, research etc ... or if necessary a snooze.

Each floor has a laundry room where we can do our laundry for free, with detergent provided. There is no cleaning service; we must clean our own rooms. We also each have a daily task in the kitchen (e.g. clean stove, clean fridge, wash floors, etc). The quiet room is a place to sit and read or make phone calls. In the quiet room is one of two phones in the home where we can make free unlimited long distance calls (with consideration for others needing to use the phone).

For those who are without a vehicle, there is also a common vehicle for the residents to use for around town only. I guess that stipulation prevents anybody from putting the vehicle with the best 4-wheel system to the test (Rob’s comment, not mine).

As mentioned in a previous blog the home also has a school, which the girls are now attending. There are only six students right now and only 3 students from K-3. Rebecca is the only Kindergarten student and Marietta the only Grade 2 student at this time. We were told originally that the teacher follows her own curriculum, but thanks to the wonderful job the girls teachers did on putting together a work package, and the fact that there is no one else taking the same grades as the girls, the teacher is following the girls current curriculum. We are really happy about this and this leaves us to do their Bible Studies.

The girls are thoroughly enjoying it here. Eventually the novelty will wear off but for now they think its one big party. We have set up a bit of a routine and that routine became a bit easier when we were finally allowed a cot in our ICU room.

Previosuly whoever went home for supper with the girls also was suppose to go to bed at the same time as the girls around 8pm (okay I admit it, I never actually made it by that time, it was usually closer to 10) and slept until around 1:30am, at which time whoever was at the hospital came back to the house to switch and get a few hours of sleep. So most nights we were getting about 4-5 hours sleep. Our bodies had adjusted to this and it was going okay, the bigger pressure was the fact that you always felt when you were at the house you needed to sleep, leaving little time to do anything else and always feeling you were rushing against time.

Thankfully ICU finally decided to be nice and allow us a cot. This has made life much more “normal” … or at least the sleeping part of life. Now we take turns staying at the hospital for the night. If a night were to go really badly then we can use the time the girls are in school or doing crafts to snooze. This also means that whoever is at the house with the girls for the evening can actually take time to return phone calls, e-mails, do blogs, laundry, etc without feeling majorly pressured to get to bed.

As much as I say we’ve set a routine, in reality I suppose it hasn’t always worked that way. There are many things in a day that can throw it off, whether it be something going on immediately with James, waiting to talk to doctors, visitors (not that we’re complaining), etc. But I suppose that’s much like normal life, routine can only work to a certain extent. Whatever the case, the Ronald MacDonald House has helped us to bring part of the family together again. It has taken several reminders to get the girls to understand that this is home now, it’s very different then a normal home, but there are still rules, bedtimes, school, etc and they have to adjust to this new concept of “home”.

We are thankful to have the girls here, and we thoroughly enjoyed our time with Matthew this weekend, except it made us miss him more and wish all the more there was some way we could fit him into our lives as well.