Breaking now…
The Michael House community fridge. The air conditioning in the ’02 van. The chair out front (Melissa now has a bruise down her arm). Oh wait, I meant to tell you breaking news. Right. Well, all of the above are true, unfortunately, but they’re all going to be fixed too, praise God, except for the old lawn chair which is waiting for bulk trash pickup. Otherwise, here’s what’s going on at The Michael House these days. Our summer Corps Ellyn arrived last week from Michigan via Notre Dame/St. Mary’s and Australia where she was touring for three weeks with her choir! So cool, but I’m not jealous of her jetlag. It’s great to have another Corps member and we’re enjoying getting to know her. We have six moms, two baby boys out and four babies still in. One is just over six months and is army crawling all over the place. The other is almost four months and loves to talk. They are both spitting up a lot at the moment; we go through stain remover like nobody’s business.
The next baby due is my contact baby and I can’t wait to meet him! We had a game night this Sunday as a house inning (we have a house outing or inning once a month) which was a blast. We played reverse charades, where one person guesses and the rest of the team acts. You can see a few of them doing “football” in the picture!
The past two Community Nights have been special because we’ve had a lot of guests. Last Monday night, two volunteers Amy and Ashlee made dinner before they presented on resumés and interviewing, and we were joined by Laura Magruder, Maggie’s Place’s executive director. This week, Laura was back, as well as Laurel who also works at the Fiat House. It’s been great to hang out with the two of them and share our community. Dinner was followed up with cake to celebrate a mom’s birthday, and then a presentation on prenatal exercise by volunteer and retired physical therapist David. His wife Karen, who is at the house volunteering so much we feel bad for David, came too and babysat while we all learned how to stretch, stand up straight, and do pregnancy friendly exercises. Pretty soon we were laying all over the floor in funny positions having a grand ole time.
Later that night we realized something was definitely wrong with the fridge, and the following morning we transferred everything into the other fridge and freezer as well as coolers. The many desserts we had received from Waste Not and St. Helen’s did not make the refrigeration cut unfortunately and had to stay out on the counter (it looked like we were running a bakery). The repairman came to look at the fridge that morning, and about half way through his work, he turned to Melissa and said, “What is this place?” We all laughed at that. It’s Maggie’s Place, and this is just another normal Maggie’s Place day!
By Lily Key, a MissionCorps member
