New Girl Arriving and Broken Bikes

The pictures below I had wanted to post at the end of the blog. The explanation of what they are comes at the end.


You're looking at every sand toy Casa Alba owns here. 2 buckets, 1 shovel.
It looks awful from the side, it looks awful if you crane your neck and look at it the right way. And, it's awful in person too. Anyone want to come and make a sand castle?
Another broken bike...
Micky can't ride this bike b/c it's broken. So he tries to push it around instead.

5 kids fighting over broken bike #1.
"I didn't get the broken bike! It's not fair"
A few minutes later, still arguing over who gets which broken bike.

Today a new little girl will arrive at Casa Alba. She's only 7 and her mom died. I'm guessing there was no one who could take her or wanted to take her so Child Protection contacted FCE and now she's coming today.

Olympia, I've talked about her before, has been looking really sad lately. There's no light in her eyes and her emotions are kept to a minimum. I'm wondering if things aren't going so hot at school. The new girl arriving today will be put in Olympia's room at Casa Alba so hopefully having a friend (for both of them) will make this new one's transition easier and maybe raise Olympia's spirits some.

Now, for the explanation of the pictures above.

Someone donated some money for bikes for Casa Alba. I'm pretty excited about picking out some to buy - more excited about seeing the kids' reactions. The few bike type things they have are all broken or not age appropriate and the kids fight over them like cats and dogs. In fact, I took pictures the last time it was happening to prove how bad the situation is. Bikes wouldn't matter so much if the rest of their playground was okay...but it's not. They have a few swings and that's it. So, any "toy" becomes a huge deal - hence all of the fighting. I think I'll be using some of the money to invest in a couple more sand toys as well - I think you'll agree with me that the sand "box" (if you even want to call it that) and the one set of sand toys isn't hardly enough.