There’s something special about the laughter you’ll hear near the orange and blue apartment buildings on South Flower Street. For the families living there, laughter has been in short supply.
Dubbed the “Miracle Manor,” the apartments provide subsidized housing to families with critically sick children.
Set up by local nonprofit Miracles for Kids, the Miracle Manor celebrated its grand opening in Orange last week, though residents moved in as early as December.
Once a privately owned apartment complex, the buildings – blocks from Children’s Hospital of Orange County – were purchased by Miracles for Kids for $2.9 million and given $760,000 in renovations.
To the earliest residents, the Colby family, the invitation to move in was a godsend.
After her daughter Sophia was diagnosed with an incredibly rare disease at 15 months old, Bridget Colby had to quit her job to care for the girl full time. For seven months, the family basically lived at the hospital.
Miracles for Kids helped the family as expenses for Sophia’s treatments mounted. When the family lost its home, the group secured a vacation rental for them to stay in while they pulled themselves together.
The Colbys found a low-rent apartment, but with rent slowly rising while the family’s limited income stayed locked in place, they found themselves struggling again. When they were at their lowest, Colby said the Miracle Manor gave the family their lives back.
“Before coming here, I’d been diagnosed with PTSD, generalized anxiety and depression. I don’t see how anyone going through things like this with their children is going to escape that,” Colby said. “From the get-go here, there was such an overwhelming sense of contentment and well-being. This is the place we belong.”
Miracle Manor bases rent on the families’ ability to pay; the costs are kept as low as possible to allow families to focus finances on their children. Potential residents of the Miracle Manor are identified through the Miracles for Kids grant program and can stay as long as needed.
The buildings are designed specifically to cater to the needs of families of children with illness. For example, the floors in each apartment are linoleum – particularly easy to clean when children vomit or have diarrhea.
CHOC, the go-to for most of Miracle Manor’s residents, is less than a mile away. When going in for a regular visit, residents can walk their children to the hospital without having to pile into the car.
Best of all for both the parents and the children, the residents said, these families have found themselves in a community where they can relate to their neighbors. Parents watch each others’ children and swap food safe for sensitive stomachs. Kids talk excitedly among each other on topics their other friends may not understand: how smelly oxygen masks are, how bad medicine tastes or how awesome their various surgery scars are.
Alex Hays, 9, had his fingernails, eyebrows, eyelashes and hair fall out. Alex would cling to his signature bucket hat – you can see him wearing it in almost all of his family’s pictures. Things changed once he arrived at the Miracle Manor, Deanna Wright, Alex’s mom, said.
After making friends he could relate to at his new home, Alex was out cycling around the neighborhood one day. His hat flew off from the wind, but Alex didn’t care – he was having too much fun just being a kid for once, Wright said.
“The community sense is so amazing,” Wright said. “He’s totally accepted here. Kids come to the door and say, ‘Hey, can Alex play?’ That never happened before.”
Contact the writer: jwinslow@ocregister.com
