New Beginnings Home

Visit to Woodland Park Zoo

Kristal — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:27:48 +0000

Staff Assistant Kristal needs her coffee to start out the day

We are so blessed by organizations and people who give to our homes. Samantha Houze (house manager of House of Hope) contacted Woodland Park Zoo and they generously offered us all free tickets to visit the zoo. Woodland Park Zoo is up in Seattle so resident Courtney and Staff Assistant Kristal decided to head up one sunny Saturday morning.

View of Seattle

Seattle is such a beautiful city with the pretty skyline in front of the water and mountains. Could help but get a picture!

Courtney and Kristal

Cat

Courtney taking a picture

Courtney is an avid and gifted photographer. She also has especially loves animals. A trip to the zoo was a wonderful way to combine her gifts and interests!

Giraffes are so cute!

Cool bird

Monkey? Not sure what this was called

Courtney remarked that this particular guy reminded her of the housedog Kahlua. Do you see a resemblance?

Housedog "Lou"

Might have had more to do with the attitude of these animals. We sometimes refer to Lou as “King Louie” as he walks around rather regally

And so ended our little trip to Woodland Park Zoo. We sure hope to bring more of our ladies up there soon.

We would like to especially thank the Zoo for the generous gift of tickets. We just couldn’t give such a quality of life without gifts like this!

Kayla’s Shower

Kristal — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:13:42 +0000

A common occurence around here is Baby Showers! This week it was Kayla’s turn. Her mom hosted her shower and she had a few friends and lots of family come to support her. Of course we New Beginnings folk came as well.

Megan (new girl) and Danielle

At this point Kayla is planning to name him Aiden and he is due on May 21st. Kayla will be moving in with a family friend who has a spare room and is offering to help with childcare. Please pray Kayla has all the help she needs as her little one arrives and she transitions to mommyhood!

Kayla and Danielle-belly comparisons

NB ladies that came to the shower

All the other residents; Housemom Heather and Staff Assistant Kristal were able to spend a beautiful afternoon celebrating the soon to come little boy.

Danielle practicing (she's due in less than 3 weeks!)

Kayla opening gifts

Kayla was certainly showered with gifts this day. Looking forward to meeting the little guy!

Fun around the house

Kristal — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:00:42 +0000

It’s not all serious mentorship and chores around here. We know how to goof around and have a little fun in the midst of the busyness. Here are the pictures to prove it and a glimpse in the day of life at New Beginnings!

Celebrating High School Graduation

Kristal — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 08:06:58 +0000

Moving in to New Beginnings gave our resident Kayla a place to be grounded so she could complete her high school education through the Washington State Insight program. She worked hard and was dedicated to doing the work on her own including a time consuming “Senior Year Project” that involved a fundraising project for New Beginnings involving large baby bottles to be filled with change at businesses.

We are so proud of the hard work Kayla put in to finishing her high school work so we threw her a little party. A few family members were able to stop by and bring gifts and we served punch and pie.

We were so happy to provide an opportunity to celebrate this achievement. Congratulations again to Kayla!

Nothing like a bonfire!

Kristal — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:35:02 +0000

Earlier this year Staff Assistant Kristal and the ladies of the house had a bonfire. Nothing gets people together like roasting hot dogs and making s’mores. It’s always fun coming up with little events to do as a family. We went through a list of questions like “if you could have any super power what would it be” and “if you could meet any famous person from any time era who would it be?”. It was a comical and interesting way to get to know our ladies in a new way.

Welcoming a New Baby

Kristal — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 06:20:31 +0000

Please join me in welcoming Emilia Rose. She was born not long before Midnight on February 13th. What a wonderful gift of love she is!

We loved her momma’s sweet spirit while she stayed with us. Please pray for her mom Rose and dad Derrick as they begin the journey of parenting this precious little one!

The gift of donations

Kristal — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:52:20 +0000

God’s faithfulness through using His people is shown well in generosity to our home. Here are a few pictures of our ladies going through huge donations of different items. From make up, home goods, clothing and baby items there is truly no end to the types of things we have been blessed with. We cannot thank those generous people enough except to remember that God sees the tiny details and blesses them for their caring hearts.

Pillows from a local bed company

Household items

Makeup donated as Mother's Day gifts

A huge pile of baby clothes

Ladies going through baby clothes together

Mary Kay donations

Christmas Reunion Party

Kristal — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:10:18 +0000

Last year began a new tradition around here and we just had to keep it going again for this Christmas. We just love to connect our residents (and oftentimes now single mom’s) over the past couple years to generous, loving people in our community who want to do something to encourage the Christmas spirit. I get to connect individuals, families and organizations with specific moms and babies to buy them gifts. We invite our current and former residents to celebrate with us and get to catch up with some of these wonderful ladies. Mom’s, babies and us staff are so blessed by this event. Check out the tree surrounded by the generosity of people in our community.

The Christmas Tree

This year we had a very kind and generous church, the Korean-American Calvary Baptist Church in Federal Way http://kacbc.org/ host us. One of the members at this church attended our banquet in October and passed information about our ministry to his pastor. Pastor Daniel generously offered to have our party at their church, serve us dinner and provide gifts to our ladies as well as to us staff!

Stockings provided by the church for each mom

Dinner was served by boys in the children’s ministry.

The boys that served us!

10 moms, 9 babies and 3 expecting moms as well as 3 staff, 2 staff children, 2 directors and our foreign exchange student. WOW! We sure had a lot of fun!

Christmas Party

Heather — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:33:25 +0000

Loud laughter filled the air while we watched two precious babies curiously playing with a banana box. The smell of glazed ham and peanut butter cookies filled the air and the soft Christmas tree lights glowed in the background. 12 beautiful young ladies and their 12 adorable babies joined us for our 1^st annual Christmas party. The evening was filled with reminiscing, laughter, eating, and lots of present opening. We were tremendously grateful to the supporters of this evening; East Main Vision Clinic, Costco, members of Mars Hill Church and several other individuals in the community as well as to our INCREDIBLE staff assistant, Kristal Bean who coordinated the entire event. The moms and babies were immensely blessed by all of our supporters’ generosity. As we watched the joy on our young ladies faces and observed all of the friendships in the room we felt an overwhelming sense of thankfulness to an awesome God whom we serve. His faithfulness and mercy cannot be compared to anything. To witness his continual pursuit and love of His children is an incredible privilege. Each and every day we thank God for allowing us to be a small part of His big plan for these young ladies.

Celebration Church lends a hand!

Heather — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:59:35 +0000

Many thanks to Celebration Church who sent a team of folks to help us prepare our yard for the fall and winter! They cleaned gutters, pulled weeds and pulled out dying flowers. What the people of Celebration church did in an afternoon would’ve taken our staff weeks to complete. We are always so grateful to volunteers for helping us with the task part of this ministry essentially freeing us up to spend time with women who live here. Thank you Celebration Church for giving up your Saturday afternoon to serve your community!