Less than Two Weeks!

The final countdown is on!  In less than two weeks, we will welcome Astrid into our home.  It's so hard to imagine--we only got the idea at the end of May, but today turned the calendar over into August. It seems to have happened fast!  We have been in contact with Astrid almost every day since we were officially matched in early July.  I'm afraid we write too often or two much, but she always responds within a couple of hours and with great enthusiasm and excitement to hear from me or Leah.  They swapped love letters last week--Leah asked me to email Astrid "Dear Astrid, I love you.  Love, Leah" and Astrid replied in kind.  Leah was so tickled, she said, "Mom, we should invite Astrid to be our host student."  I wonder why she thought we were in touch before that!

Now we are hammering out the final nuts and bolts.  I've been changing the dead light bulbs around the house, decluttering and cleaning, shopping, and this week I've been in touch with Astrid's new school to get things ready academically.  It turns out she will start school on August 24, which is surprisingly early to me!  I like to go to the beach for my birthday, which is August 23, so we'll have to go a day or two early so that she is well rested in time for school. 

Astrid emailed me today that she was starting to prepare her schoolwork, assignments for which she had found on the school website.  I was so impressed by her initiative to start doing her reading and whatnot.  I emailed the head of school to confirm that she was in the classes that required summer reading, and she is, but the teachers said she didn't have to do it.  Still, she wants to do it, so I think that's great.  She'll be well prepared to start.  We also got the morning bus squared away--the school is about 20 minutes away from our house, and although I am willing to drive my kids there every morning, it does make it difficult to get my morning routine complete.  The school has very helpfully offered that we can use their morning bus service, and so I'll only have to drive down to the school once a day, which is awesome.

In other news, I successfully trained nine host families for AFS Virginia last weekend.  It was a pretty awesome crowd and they said they learned a lot.  I was excited for all the kids coming, as I think they are all going to some pretty neat families.  We have 27 kids coming to VA from 15 different countries, I do believe, including one other girl from Denmark.  Her host mom was at my training so it was nice to connect.

So that's where things stand with only 11 days to go!  I am learning about Denmark and that will be the subject of my next post in a day or two.  Until then, consider hosting!  We still need host families!!  Visit AFSUSA.org for more information.  You'll never regret it.

It's Official!

Leah and I just got back from a 14 day trip through Belgium with our former AFS'er Ine and her family, and on the second day we were in Belgium, we got the official word that we had been matched with Astrid, and were going to be a host family!

I thought, "Well, I can't spend too much time on this right now, I have to focus on what I'm doing here in Belgium", so I dashed off a quick email to Astrid, but she responded very quickly and very enthusiastically about how she is so excited to be joining our family, that I couldn't help but respond myself. :-)  She and her family were on vacation while we were on our vacation, so we tried to only email when we weren't all busy with other things.  I have heard from her quite a lot in the past two weeks, and she sounds like an absolute sweetheart.  Very open to the experience of being an exchange student, and easy going and laid back.  She has no expectations about being brought to certain places or doing certain things, she's just excited to be coming.  I will of course do my best to make the year special for her, but I think it will be a fairly easy job! :-)

We will also be a temporary welcome family for a young lady from South Africa whose host family can't pick her up till about 3 days after the kids arrive.  Leah is pretty excited about that as well, as Dipthi from South Africa is "a brown person like me!"  I have explained it's only for a few days, and happily, Leah is ok with that. 

So for the next few weeks, I don't think there will be too much news on the hosting front.  We'll be getting the house and Astrid's room ready, I'll be conducting host family orientation and working on the arrival orientation for the students, and trying to learn more about Denmark in the meantime!  I'll try to post at least once more before Astrid arrives on August 12, so check in again! :) 

See you soon!

Welcome!

It's a surprise to be here again after I swore I wouldn't host this year.  Last year, we had an exchange student and it didn't pan out so well, and I thought even though we had a year off, maybe we should have another year off to just relax and get Leah a little bit older and see what was what.  However, Leah and fate had other plans...

Before I get ahead of myself, let me introduce our little family!  My name is Susan and I am a single woman in my 40's, as I was widowed almost 4 years ago.  I live in Virginia with my daughter, the aforementioned Leah, who is 7 and going on 17.  I have been involved with AFS as either a host sibling, host parent, or volunteer on and off since 1990, when my parents hosted a lovely young woman from Japan for 3 weeks in the summer.  About 6 years ago, I had the bug to host a student, and we hosted Penny from Thailand (link goes to our blog of that experience) for a year as first time host parents.  Leah was a year old, my husband was still alive, and it was quite a year.  I will never forget it as long as I live.  The following year, we were a welcome family for Kristin from Iceland, but unfortunately a death in our family kept us from completing the year with her.  It was a very interesting experience and culture to learn about.  A year later, my husband passed away and I took two years off from doing anything with AFS while I tried to get the ground back under my feet.  However, we got a new area team leader, and she called to ask if I would consider volunteering.  I happily agreed.  A month later, she called back and asked if I would consider hosting.  That took some additional thought.  I genuinely wanted to host again, but I was also terrified of being a single parent of a teenager and a kindergartener.  Eventually, I decided to take the plunge, and we hosted Ine from Belgium for a year.  It was truly one of the most incredible things I have ever done.  It went so well, I got cocky a little bit, and decided to immediately host again.  But I think it was too soon, and our student wasn't well suited to life with a younger sibling, so we hosted Urara from Japan for about 6 weeks before she left and went to the first of several families following our home.  It was definitely a hard experience, and a disappointing one, but I learned that I need to give myself downtime between exchanges and also that I need to look for certain things when reading the students' applications.  Specifically, I need to find students who are either interested in having younger siblings or enjoy being around younger children.

So this year, I have really thrown myself into AFS and doing a lot of volunteer work.  I have interviewed quite a few students for scholarships to travel abroad,  I've been interviewing  host families, making lots of recruitment calls, helping coordinate family trainings, I have even worked on getting our students' arrival orientation moved to Fredericksburg and all that entails.  It's felt like a full time job from time to time, but I have really enjoyed it a lot.  I've gotten to read lots of really great student applications, and there have been a few here and there that kind of piqued my interest, but no one really got me excited until I read an application for Astrid from Denmark.

Leah has always wanted to host another student or adopt another sibling, or pretty much anything to have more people in the house.  She absolutely loves having big sisters, and she says we don't feel like a family until we have more people in the house.  So I decided to take a chance on Astrid.  I read Leah her application and she agreed that she sounded great.  Astrid listed her main hobbies as running and doing make up, and her parents said she has an excellent way with children.  Astrid in fact wrote in her letter of introduction that she hoped there would be children in the home who would be happy to have her there.  Leah's main hobbies are running and doing make up, and she is extremely enthusiastic about having teenagers around.

So I put in an email to our area team leader, and asked if we would be able to host Astrid--in our case, our local high school is closed, so it requires AFS to pay for a private school education at a local school about 10 miles from our home, and requires me to provide transportation, but I don't mind doing it.  Alex, our team leader, agreed to see if it could be worked out, and so she started the wheels in motion, we filled out our application, and here we are, two weeks later, hoping to hear that Astrid is coming.

The main hold ups are the school wanting to do an interview with Astrid to get a sense of who she is, and then Astrid and her family will have to agree to her being placed with a single parent here in the US.  Then I believe we will be in business!  I'm very excited to be able to start communicating with her, hopefully soon, and start learning about Denmark--about which I know Hamlet, butter cookies, and Hans Christian Andersen.  I'm dreaming of the fun we can have, the things we can do together, and just looking forward to a positive experience for us all...

So I'll keep you all posted as we hear that Astrid is going to join our family, what I learn about Denmark, and eventually about our experiences and adventures in hosting!  Stay tuned!