Into the Volcano

After we got back from the beach, we decided to take a trek into the nearby volcano. We have been wanting to do it since we arrived in country, and our friends were game for the adventure. We drove about 1/2 an hour first to the nearby lake, Taal Lake. Then we hired 3 VERY small bangkas (those same outrigger boats - except these only seat a few people). The trip TO the volcano was rough enough - the trip back was absolutely unbelieavable. The waves were massive, and the boats were tiny - a bad combination! Nothing like a near-death experience to bond people together, and we feel very bonded to Jonathan and Kelley now! We were drenched but happy to be alive when we finally made it back from our trek. But that is telling you the end of the story first (which may be just as well for those grandmas and grandmas-at-heart out there)...Once we landed on the volcano (Taal Volcano for all you volcano buffs out there), this was the sight we saw. That is the rim of the volcano popping up behind the trees. We had to hike up to the top, then down into the volcano - oh yeah, then back again. Quite the trip with 4 little ones. :)
And we're off! Our friend, Walter, came along to help us carry Zach (he couldn't very well hike with a broken leg). We also hired a guide to show us the trail up there. What we didn't know is he had not been up there himself for more than a year, and we were coming up the opposite side from where tourists normally come - so the path was very questionable.
Steve carried the pack, and he and I switched back and forth carrying Ben. As you can see, the pack and Ben was quite the load. Mikayla did a great job hiking the whole day without help.The closer we got to the rim of the volcano, the denser the cogan grass and thorn bushes became. The path had become overgrown, and we ended up just clearing a path as we went. It was hard, painful work, and we all ended up with dozens of thorn scratches and grass cuts before it was all said and done. They held a blanket over baby Kiran to protect her from the underbrush. Mercifully, she slept through the whole ordeal. We definitely got more of an adventure than we had bargained for. We all felt like this at some point or another as we were skewered by a thorn or sliced by a sharp piece of grass. Poor guy. After we arrived back at our car after a very long day, Steve took the bags of Zach's cast - and then pulled a large thorn out of his toe. His response? "So THAT'S why it was hurting so bad!"

When the thorns weren't too thick, we tried to let Ben walk a while on his own, but the grass swallowed him alive.

Once we battled our way to the top of the ridge, we were rewarded with this amazing view into the volcano itself. It is called Crater Lake, and it is located inside the volcano.
The view down into the volcano was amazing, but as we stood on the ridge, so was the view back the other way, over the path we had just come and across the lake. You can see the view behind our friends in the pic below. They were such good sports about the whole clearing-a-path-through-the-thorns thing. Once we worked our way along the ridge for nearly an hour (the path the guide was going to take down into the volcano was too overgrown so we had to hike along the rim to get to a different one), we came to a little clearing. Kelley and I decided to stay there with the little ones (Kiran and Ben) and get lunch going while the rest hiked down into the crater. Here they are wading in the very hot, sulfuric water in the crater. In some places, it was too hot to stand in; but in some you could wade. On the other side of the lake, you can even swim in it!
What an amazing experience for our kids! Talk about an educational field trip!
I had gotten a fire going so once the crew hiked back up to the ridge, we enjoyed a great lunch of hotdogs and chips. The view from our picnic spot was spectacular.
We had such a wonderful time with our friends while they were here; it was such an encouragement to us in the midst of some tough times. The beach was amazing, and the Taal Trek an adventure we will never forget.

At the Beach!

Hello again! Sorry to it's been so long...

Our New Years went great - hope yours did as well. On the 5th of January, some close friends of ours who live in South Asia arrived for a visit. We had an absolute blast with them and their new baby daughter. The day they arrived, we drove down to the pier about 1 1/2 south of us and took a small ferry (a bangka outrigger boat) over to the island of Mindoro. The waves were pretty big, and the trip was an adventure, but we arrived safely to a gorgeous beach getaway. We had a wonderful time there - exactly what we needed.

Our enjoyment of the time was tempered though when we found out that Gizmo, our beloved golden lab, was sick again with a liver disease he he gotten several times because our neighbor keeps throwing sick cats over the wall into our yard (yes, we have talked to him, and, no, it hasn't helped). Our coworker went and bought the expensive meds for Gizmo again and started treating him. However, our helper had failed to tell us right away when Gizmo started getting sick so the disease was further advanced, and the meds didn't help this time. Gizmo died before we got home from the beach. He was a wonderful guard dog and a real friend to all of us. We miss him.

That being said, we did have a great time at the beach, and here are some pics.

Here is the bangka we crossed the channel in. Exciting!

This is the sight that greeted us as we pulled up to our resort. Isn't it amazing?

Zach's casted leg made a trip to the beach a little more interesting to say the least. This is how he spent most of the time - with a plastic bag over his cast, then a sock over that, then pajama pants over that to try to keep the sand out. Then he sat and played in the sand for hours on end. He has been such a little trouper about this whole thing - such a great attitude. He didn't even complain as his siblings jumped the waves while he just sat and watched. What a kid!

We brought a kite with, and the kids had a blast with it. I love Ben's smile in the pic above. While we were there, Zach hit the 4-week mark with his cast and was allowed to start walking on it again. He celebrated by flying the kite.

Before, Ben has been a little nervous of the waves. This time he was fearless and kept running in and out of them, having a ball. Go, Ben!Climbing is life for Zach, and he has been denied for a month now. As soon as he was allowed to walk on his cast, he was climbing again - all over the rocks and even up in trees. He looked pretty funny climbing while hauling his leg behind him, but he had a blast.
Our kids also had fun having a baby around again. This is Zach with our friends' precious little girl, Kiran. Between the 3 kids, I think the question, "Can I hold her now?" was a continuous one throughout the weekend.We bought this raft so that Zach could ride the waves at the beach. We bundled him up in garbage bags and tape a couple times so he could take a ride, but he ended up being nearly as happy just playing in the sand or climbing on the rocks. The other kids enjoyed the raft as well though - this is Ben taking a turn.
Mikayla wanted to pose for some beach pictures - her idea (but I was not complaining!) This one is my favorite. Our little girl is growing up so fast!
Ok, so if you are not already convinced that you simply must come visit us in the Philippines, these next few pics will change your mind. How can you say no? Wonderful people AND breath-taking scenery... go book your tickets! :)

What an amazing weekend! Check back in a few days for pics of our hike INTO a volcano.

In the meantime, please be praying for our families in central Missouri as they are currently being slammed by a severe ice storm. My (Jen's) mom and grandma are home alone as my dad is at a speaking engagement out of state. Please pray for their safety and warmth as they are supposed to lose power in 0 degree temps. Also, my parents are supposed to leave out of St. Louis next week to come here for a visit. Please pray with us that this does not affect their trip!

We Have a House!!!

We have a house!!! We are so very thankful. Thank you all for praying with us in this. Steve and our business manager were able to meet with the owner on Saturday morning, and the meeting went great. We will be able to move in on schedule (barring any delays in the "fixing up") in February. It has been a long 3 months of searching, and we are ecstatic to have a home to move into now.
Steve is on his way home now and hopes to arrive by 10 pm. Please pray for safety as he travels and also that he would start feeling better as he is currently having some stomach trouble (par for the course when you travel here and sometimes end up eating at less-than-sanitary places). Tomorrow morning (the 31st), we will leave to spend New Years a couple hours from here with some friends. We hope you all have a wonderful New Years! You enjoy your chilly evening by the fireplace, and we will enjoy our lounging outside on a pleasant tropical evening under the coconut trees! :)
Praise Him with us for our new home!

House Update

Just talked to Steve on the phone. Thank you to all of you who prayed at 6 am CST, and please keep praying. The owner has not yet arrived in Bicol; he is currently enroute. However, they were able to talk to him on the phone at the appointment time, and the phone call went very well. He is very interested in meeting with us which is a great sign; Filipinos are non-confrontational so if he wasn't interested, he would rather avoid meeting than have to say it in person. Steve is very encouraged that it looks like it will work out. That being said, he now has to wait another day so he can meet with the owner tomorrow morning at 9 am (that is 7 pm CST on Friday evening). He hopes to be able to leave Iriga, Bicol by noon which puts him home late tomorrow night, probably after 10 pm. Did I mention we leave the following morning to spend New Years with some friends a few hours away? Never a dull moment around here... :) Thanks again for continuing to pray with us that this house would come through. We know if it doesn't, it is because He has another plan, but it would sure make life less stressful if this one were the one. I am sure you understand.

Hagen Family Christmas

Ok, I admit that the next few posts are mainly for the grandparents and other equally-interested parties. So all of you out there who don't have the time to read about the Hagen family Christmas traditions, please feel complete freedom (free of guilt :) ) to skip this post (but if you have not see the post I did about Mikayla and my trip recently, you should definitely check it out - located after the Christmas ones). Also, if you opt to skip this post, be sure to check back with us in a few days for a new one; I try to update fairly often. A few years ago we started the tradition of sleeping "under the Christmas tree" (translation: in the living room) every Christmas eve as a family. We set up the mattresses, the kids get to open 1 present (new pajamas) and watch a Christmassy movie while eating popcorn and drinking hot cocoa. Family fun for everyone! :)
When the kids wake up the next morning (they made it to almost 7 am this year!), they open up their stockings that are stuffed with little toys, treats (like grapes - treats change once you get overseas) and a little candy too.
After the stockings, we do living room clean up and get dressed then have coffee cake for breakfast. Then Steve tells the Christmas story (this year Ben did somersaults during most of it) and we talk about the real meaning of Christmas.

Then it is time for presents! We have tried year after year to keep the number of presents "reasonable", and I think we finally pulled it off this year (being so far away I think helps with this). Here's a pic of the kids with their loot.
After opening presents as a family (this year it culminated with a treasure hunt for the kids to find their big presents from us - see the following posts for what those were), we do Christmas on skype with video with grandparents in the States. Then we just enjoy family time the rest of the day, including a dinner and an all-important nap. Oh - and we answer the door a LOT. Caroling here takes on a whole new meaning - people come to your door all day long, some singing, some just saying that they are "Christmassing" (in Tagalog of course). You have to go give them money or food or they will stay there all day calling out. So our front door gets quite the work out all day as well.Well, there you have more than you probably wanted to know about our Christmas. Do you have any family Christmas traditions you can share with us?
Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas!

Our new house

Unfortunately, I am not talking about our new home in Bicol (though we do appreciate your prayers about that this week as Steve is down there right now attempting to meet with the owner of the home we would like to rent). I am talking about the new doll house Steve and I made for Mikayla for Christmas. I am sure most of you couldn't care less (fair enough) but some of you asked to see pics. I had trouble loading this one with the next post (where you will find some more if you want to see them) so here it is.

Our Christmas

Steve and I worked together in our free evenings for the last 2 months to make Mikayla a doll house for her Polly Pockets (a little kind of doll for all of you who don't have a little girl :) ). Mikayla absolutely loved it, and we had a blast making it.She even got 2 Polly cars for Christmas - one from the Raush family in Kansas and one from our coworkers here. She was thrilled.
The boys got matching "twist cars". You just twist the steering wheel back and forth and the car moves. The 2 have been having a blast racing around our house and have had only a few collisions in the process.
The kids got these foam disc guns from my (Jen's) parents, and they have been chasing each other around the house with them ever since. Ben didn't quite have them figured out at first though - he kept shooting himself in the face.
After all the present fun, we sat down to a family dinner of grilled salmon and twice-baked potatoes and salad and more. It was a great family day.
We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas as well, celebrating our Savior's birth with loved ones.

Our trip

I had a few extra pics that I couldn't fit on the next 2 posts. This first one is a great shot of the 2 cousins enjoying some time together under the fountains. For more pics of our time with them and how it went, check out the next post. Aren't they adorable? This one is of us at the top of a tower shaped like the CN tower (tall and skinny with a ball at the top) that overlooks the awesome twin towers. For more pics of these amazing towers, check out the pics in the post after the next one.
Hope you all had a great Christmas celebrating our Savior's birth with loved ones. Ours was a quiet time at home with "just us". We were very much in need of some down time as a family after all the recent craziness. I will try to get some pics up of our time soon. Love you all!

Fun with the cousins

It had been more than 18 months since we had seen my sister and her family so their 2-year-old did not remember us, and we had never met their baby. But we all had a great time together. We went swimming...Look at her jump!
and played at the playground...
and tried to duck through the fountains by the towers (see the next post for pics of the amazing towers)
and read LOTS of stories - actually, just the same stories repeatedly...

and made a cool gingerbread house...
and worked hard too.
Mikayla was such a massive help; I was so very glad that she came with me. She worked her little tail off - doing dishes, switching laundry, changing diapers, dressing and bathing her cousins, and more! I think my sis and her husband are now considering adopting a 6-year-old... :)

We had a great time as mother and daughter on our trip. I am so proud of our little girl - who's not so little anymore.

The Towers

We got to see some amazing towers on our trip to visit my sister. They are the tallest twin towers in the world, and they are connected by a "sky bridge". They were gorgeous. There is a great mall at the bottom of the towers where we spent some time at Starbucks. :)

The first time we saw them was at night, and they were lit up beautifully. Who needs Christmas lights when you have these towers?My brother took this picture below while lying in a ditch looking up at us! That was right by all the guys selling watches - just one watch per guy and no box or price tag. Makes you more than a little suspicious... And makes you want to watch your stuff around them!
One day we got to go up to visit the sky bridge. It was a great experience and had a gorgeous view of their amazing city. I am not a city person, but if I had to choose a city to live in... the puddles after it rained had CLEAR water in them! I guess you would have to live in a dirty (regular) city to understand the significance of that. And it was so colorful. And no traffic (at least not in comparison to Manila!) It was a great city. The pic below shows the girls enjoying the view from the sky bridge.

We're back!

Just wanted to let you all know that Mikayla and I arrived home safely last night. The trip was tiring but pretty uneventful - except for when we almost ended up going to Jakarta by accident! It was almost time to board, and Kayla needed to run into the bathroom for a sec so we hurried there. When we got back, we had obviously missed an announcement, and there was a group lined up at our gate so we joined the line, showed our passes, and went through. As we were walking across the runway to our plane (things work a little differently in the 3rd world), I became suspicious because no one we were with seemed to be Filipino, and we were going to the Philippines. I started asking around and discovered it was the plane to Jakarta, Indonesia, NOT the one to the Philippines after all! It could have been bad because the plane is "free seating" so there would have been no one to fight with me about a seat assignment and no way to know we were on the wrong plane! Anyway, we headed back to the terminal - only to discover we were now locked out. It all worked itself out in the end, and we did arrive safely - in the PHILIPPINES! :)
Upon our arrival, we were pleasantly surprised to discover several packages awaiting us - and even more pleasantly surprised to discover that the boys had waited for us before opening them! It was so much fun to get Christmas in a box and such an encouragement from home. Thank you so much, O-Hills and Rauschs!

You more observant ones out there may have noticed that Ben is wearing "big-boy underwear". Yes, we are TRYING to potty train him, but we think it is going to be a long process. He is interested and doing ok, but I think he is going through nearly as many underwear as he did diapers. :)

We had an early Christmas with Steve's family on skype this morning, and I thought you might like to see how we manage to share Christmas with our family across the ocean. The kids get to open their presents from Grandma and Grandpa while they watch via video! Skype is great. Notice Ben in his underwear again - that is pretty much his uniform nowadays. :)

I will try to get some pics up soon of our time visiting my sister and her family - so be sure to check back in a couple days for some very cool pics. Thanks for praying for all of us during that time - the surgery and the time went well, and we were so thankful to be able to be there to help them out.

Merry Christmas to all of you!

Not Again!

This makes two broken bones for Zach in under a year. Last time he was bucked off of a horse and broke his wrist, this time he put his foot down on a porch swing and the force cracked the tibia (thats the big bone in the lower leg for those of you like me who forgot middle school anatomy.) Thankfully our coworkers son was with him and heard the crack so I brought him in for an X-Ray, just in case. He really looked fine, esp. after some tylenol for the pain, but sure enough they found a crack. He was brave for the whole thing, although he is understandably nervous about having a cast on again after the reaction he had to the last one. For about a week he woke up crying every night, complaining that it was itching him then when we finally had it removed, we found open, bleeding sores on most of his arm. Pray for him that he will not become fearful of his cast and also for Jen who is not able to be here with her little boy who just got hurt.

I guess he comes by it honestly enough, I (His Dad - I actually do know how to post a blog, I just don't very often - ie. this is my first!) broke my leg when I was young as well, and my wrist when I was a little older. He does have me beat in time wise though.