Some of our favorite pictures

Below are some random pictures of the kids and staff - hope they make you smile!

Angel is examining her cracker to make sure their is enogh salt.

Here is a picture of Christin with Isabel. Any time we have a camera, Isabel is always in the center of the pictures...as you can see.

Cedi is always happy when he is near his Tito (Uncle) Dean.

We have taught the staff how to play spoons. Lets just say that they are very competitive.

We made chocolate covered peanuts for the kids and Haymes has decorated his face with the chocolate. Needless to say it was very hard to stay clean with the heat and humitity melting the chocolate very quickly.


Here is Meka throwing a temper tantrum. She is so upset that her hair has stood straight up. This hair style is actually very common with the infant girls here at SP. The caregivers have a lot of fun with Meka and Angel's hair.



Khomer is showing his "cool" side.

Dean loves to play with Cedi's ears and got a little carried away.



Here are the three sisters (Jenny, Bea, and Roxanne) showing how close they are.





The four infant were playing peek-a-boo at the same time.

Cedi looks way better in Dean's hat than Dean does.

Smore night

Smore night at Samaritan's Place!! Below are a few pictures of that blistery cold night a few weeks ago (totally kidding on the "cold" part) when the staff got together to have some good ol' fashioned smores! Yuuuum!

Since SP is in a residential community and not on a farm, we had to build the fire on some old metal sheets and put scraps of wood on it to use as our fire pit.

Here is a picture of some of us carefully toasting our marshmallows... the wind direction kept changing so we had to hop around a lot, making sure we didn't start to suffer from smoke inhalation!

This is Joe, one of the housefathers, working on another marshmallow for his next smore. All in all, the staff really enjoyed the experience and suggested that next time we do hot dogs and even make some beans or something... sounds like it might turn into a real nice cookout by the time we leave! (-: Yeee haw!

The infants are MOBILE!!

So, as you may have read in our latest update, all of the babies (minus Tony, who is only 10 weeks old) have recently learned how to walk!! YAAAAYYYY! Below are pictures of them using their new talent...

This is Cedi - the little boy who the doctors were wondering if he would ever learn to walk. Looks like he is walking to me!! See how excited he is? Too great...

Dean is the one taking the picture here - Cedi loves his Tito Dean!! In the background is Richelle, the social worker here at SP. She has been with Cedi since he was born and they are very close....She is VERY proud of him!!

Aaahhhh! Here Cedi lost his balance and is about to fall into Dean's lap. Catch me!!

Ok, here is a picture of Meka (she has known how to walk now for a couple of months) and her little sister, Angel. This picture was taken during the first few days of Angel walking and it was super sweet because I (Christin) told Meka to help her sister walk and to go hold her hand and Meka waddled right over to Angel and did just that! Super smart and wonderful little girl!!

And this is McCoy, the last of the walking team. Here he is sporting his new skill out in the garden while wearing a very flattering Garfield shirt. Look at that concentration...

Island Cove adventure

Below are some pictures that we took while at Island Cove, a little amusement-like park close to Manila. It also had a small zoo, so here are a few pictures from that! (-:

Here I, Christin, am seriously 2 feet away from this tiger. I could have reached out and pet him, but I wasn't sure how friendly he would be to visitors. (-: There were about 12 tigers in all in various cages - it was pretty amazing to see them so close up! Not sure if that would fly in the US... (-:

Here, Dean is petting a baby tiger cub who is about 2 months old!! That was a "first" for both Dean and I - and yes, the cub was very soft and sweet.

In another part of the zoo, they had about 100 different crocodiles, all separated by age. They were EVERYWHERE! Neat bit of trivia we learned - in order to stay cool, crocodiles will open their mouths which allows them to stay about 10 degrees cooler. I kinda thought it was because they wanted to show off their nice dental work. (-:

Here is an ostrich, eating in the shade. They were HUGE!

We ended up spending over half the day at Island Cove and got a pretty nice burn during it, but all in all, it was a great adventure and we have some pretty great memories from it. (-: