The Juniper Tree

For our first week in Thailand we had been by our scheduled to stay at the Juniper Tree. It's a place for Christian workers in Asia to go to rest and rejuvenate. We met people from China, India, Hong Kong and many other places. It's very low cost and is a really neat ministry. The grounds are GORGEOUS! It really was the perfect place for our family to relax and focus on getting over jet lag. If you've never experienced jet lag - especially jet lag with three kids getting over jet lag as well - you know it's not necessarily easy. Kids wanting to sleep all day and be up all night. Or waking up at 3am ready to start the day. Your body not knowing what it's supposed to be doing. I was so dreading jet lag this time. It was so hard coming back from Korea. But it went so much better than I expected. And the Juniper Tree had much to do with it. They provided all of our meals and even had a laundry service. It's so hard to be in a new country, not knowing the language and having to figure out how to get food for your family. This made things so nice. There was no TV, and we had to pay for Internet, so we really just hung out with the kids and tried to relax. After the last 6 months of craziness, I almost had to learn how to do it again!

They loved it there. They made instant friends and spent hours just running around the compound...it was a pretty small place with a big cement wall around it. You'd know how amazing this was if you'd known my kids a month ago. They hated to be outside. Orin was deathly afraid of bees and loud noises. Caiah hated dirt. So it was so wonderful for us to watch them having so much fun.

This was the view from our balcony. Our little "house" was just two rooms with beds in each room. The deck was huge and had a Thai "couch" and two chairs. One day I heard Orin telling his friend, "You can come up to our den...isn't it funny that our den is outside!" It was definitely rustic (I felt like I was camping in a cabin). If you took a step in one part of the house and you could feel and hear it everywhere. I think we would have gotten pretty crowded if we had all stay there for much longer but it was great for a week.

Orin playing on one of the playgrounds.

There was a great pool and the kids just loved it.

In Thailand we don't have lemons but the limes aren't the same either...it's sort of a mix between the two. But Orin loves them just the same!

One day they were so excited because they found a snail. They wanted to feed it so we looked it up and found out that they like carrots. It was actually eating it! I swear, I was wondering who these kids were.
Sora loved to play on the stairs leading up to our "den". They were pretty steep so she didn't get to do it often.

The dining room was great because there was a play area in it. So as soon as the kids were done eating they could go run around and play and the adults could finish their meals and just talk. Everything was family style...so we'd sit with a different family almost every day, but we also had some meals just by ourselves.