Baby Home goes to the Boys' House!

Our water hasn't been working so well the past couple of days, and this morning when Tía Lucy and I woke up, it wasn't working at all. After dripping out of the faucet for about a minute, it completely stopped and never came back. We're not sure why, but our water tank was empty (again). The problem with that is that we need to call the water company so they can send someone with a water truck to fill it up again… and since we're in Bolivia, it never means they're in a hurry to get here. 

In case you've never had to live in a house with 16 babies and any random number of adults in a decently-sized house without water… Imagine this: You wake up at 6am to start getting the kids ready. You need water to make 16 bottles/cups of milk and to wash the kids off (diapers/faces). With no water coming out of the faucets, you use what little water you have in two teapots on the stove to make bottles. What about water to make breakfast? No problem there, scrambled eggs were on the menu for this morning! Pour a couple ounces of that boiling water into a bucket to warm up water to wash the kids so that'll be taken care of, too. No shower for the tía this morning. At 8am, it's time to hand-wash two loads of dirty diapers. We also need to throw in a load of clothes into the washing machine. With no water, that can't be done. Neither can the cleaning (mopping the floor upstairs) that Tía Silvia needs to do. After breakfast, we need to wash off the kids hands/faces/tables, clean the dining room, and wash the dishes… With no water, none of that can be done. Go upstairs after breakfast to change diapers. Since we use cloth diapers and all are still dirty from being unable to wash, how do we do that? Beg the office for disposables (but what if we don't have any more)? So, that's just our day and need for water until 9am…

Can you imagine going a whole day without water?! It's awful. The office agreed to let us take all of the babies, their supplies for the day, cooking supplies for Tía Silvia, and all of our dirty clothes to House 2 for the day. It took two trips back and forth to collect everything, but it made the day SO much more enjoyable!

We had the house to ourselves all morning as the boys were at school, and they were home just long enough to have lunch before heading out again with the tía, so we had an afternoon to ourselves, too. We wanted the babies to nap but weren't sure how we'd pull that off with 6 little boys running around, but we need not have worried. They left before nap time began. 

We stayed through dinner before packing up to head back to the baby house. Rudi Booher came over as we were packing up (their house is just down the street from the boys' house) and offered to drive some of our stuff home too. It was SUCH a huge help! We were able to get everyone and everything home in one trip. Unfortunately, we came home to no water, but as we'd made before-bedtime bottles while at house 2, that wasn't a concern. We did realize, however, that we had absolutely no water left at home to make during-the-night bottles (if we wanted to make morning bottles) and had failed to bring back a bucket of water just in case from the boys' house. Luckily, the babies had a fabulous night and only baby A. woke up for milk (we gave him a small bottle which he was fine with) during the night. 

As I'm actually writing this post days later… the water guy came over Thursday morning to fill up our tank, so we're back to having water!