Emily’s first chocolate chip cookie experience.

My mom taught Emily how to make chocolate chip cookies while she was visiting.  I grew up eating my moms cookies and I make them now myself sometimes, although they are bad for my waistline for sure…  They’re addicting and really good.  Here is Emily’s first experience with a chocolate chip cookie!

She liked them.  A lot.  Who doesn’t though?  (Actually I do know a few people who don’t.. <Ahem> – Rachel and Donna.  Wierdos. =D )  She also liked my parents Golden Retriever, Maddie, who Abbie calls “the old grey-faced dog”.  She went around saying “She’s such a good old grey-faced dog.” the entire time Maddie was here.  haha!  I want a Golden so bad!  Who wants to get me one for my birthday??  (Dad and Mom???) 

Picking up Emily

We picked Emily up from the airport the first weekend in August.  I can honestly say I really wasn’t nervous about it at all.  Excited and anxious, yes, but I wasn’t nervous.

Abbie was a little bit shy at first, but she did walk right up to Emily and give her the sign she made for her.  Ben ran around like a lunatic, as usual.

Emily only brought one little suitcase and one big one with her to live here for almost a year.  As someone who packs one large suitcase per person for a weeks vacation, I was rather impressed.

And this is what happens when you hand your dSLR to someone else, all set up and ready to go, and ask them to take your picture….  Ugh.  Our first shot with all 5 of us, just a TAD bit blurry.  Oh well.  Hopefully the hundreds following this one will be better.  =)

Getting settled

This week has been another week of adjustments for us all.  Emily is adjusting really well to being here in the US.  She’s taken to her new school like a champ and it seems as though she just fits in naturally with our family.  There’s nothing forced about our relationship with her at all and I love how open she is with us and how open we can be with her.  We are all really happy she’s here.

Abbie and Emily are gone most of the day Monday through Friday.  Emily rides the bus to school and on Mon, Tues, Thurs and Fri she catches the bus around 6:40am and on Weds they usually have late starts so it’s an hour and a half later.  She gets home around 2:30pm every day.  Abbie has to be to school by 8am.  So instead of the kids and me getting up around 8:30am, like we used to, I am up at 6:45am now and the kids are up before 7:15am.  We eat breakfast and I either take Abbie to school by bike or car.  I love that her school is only about 5 mins away by car and less than 10 mins away by bike.  It’s a nice way to start the morning since it’s usually in the 90’s at 8am here, instead of the 115’s….  Ben loves to go for rides and I’m really pimping out my bike, if I do say so myself.  I have the seat on the back for Ben, and I pull the Burley with Abbie in it.  I just got a basket for the front of it, which I’m excited about, and I also have front and rear lights on it, and a bell!  Now I need to put my water bottle holder back on it, but I have no clue where that went.  And I also have one of those little odometer things on my bike, but I can’t get it to work for some reason.  Another thing for me to work on, I suppose. 

Abbie gets out of school at 3pm, and usually Emily will go with Ben and me to pick her up, and we usually drive since 3pm is about the hottest time of day out here.

I thought that it would be really hard to push Ben’s nap up an hour and a half, but it’s been VERY easy.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised.  He’s in bed no later than noon now, sometimes 11:30am and then I wake him up at 2:45pm, and we jump in the car to go get Abbie.  And the kids go to be around 7:30pm now instead of 8:30pm.  And I go to bed around 10:30pm instead of midnight.  Works better for all of us really.  I feel like we have a good routine going here now and we’re all getting used to it.  Our roughest time of day is from about 4-5pm when Abbie gets restless and Ben gets hungry and I try to hold them off until Mark gets home and cook dinner.  Emily has been very helpful during that time, so that’s been a huge blessing to us.

Overall, I think we’re all adjusting well and this week went a lot better than I was anticipating!  My parents get here tomorrow and then 3 days after they leave we head to San Diego for a few days!  August will be over before we know it, which is fine with me since this heat is NOT fun!

Ready for Emily

We are finally ready for Emily’s arrival, which is a good thing considering she gets here tomorrow!  It seems a little bit surreal that she’ll be here in less than 24 hours.  She’s currently in NYC having a bunch of fun with a group of kids with a travel company.

Her room is ready.   It’s by far, the most put together room I think we’ve ever had in a house.  Now if we could just get all the other rooms up to that standard…  I’ll post before and after pictures of the room soon, but I want her to see the room in person before she sees it online so I’ll wait until after she’s here.  We finally found bedding that we really like for her room and I’ve gotten a few accessories (picture frames, candles, etc) that match.  I’m still looking for a few more things to hang on the wall, but for now, I think it’ll definitely work for her.

Mark and I have been talking about Emily’s arrival for weeks and weeks.  Every time we do anything – go to church, go to a restaurant with a massive menu, go to Costco, work in the yard out in the heat – we’ve been wondering what Emily will think of it, and now, tomorrow, we get to find out.  Mark is so sweet and has been thinking about when she might feel homesick and how we can remedy that for her and what we can do if she does feel homesick.  He’s very thoughtful like that.  We are just so excited for her to get here.  I honestly feel like I already love this girl and I’ve never even met her.  I’ve been in contact with her quite a bit in the past few weeks, along with her mom, whom I also adore.  Emily will obviously be our primary concern, but as a mother, I also want this to be a good experience for her mom too.  I couldn’t even imagine how hard it would be to say goodbye to a 16 year old for almost a year.  My heart breaks a little for her mom, but I know that we’ll try to take good care of Emily for her too.

So this is our last day as a family of 4!  Tomorrow we will be a family of 5 (without having to push out a baby – major bonus!!) and we are just as excited as we would be if we were giving birth to another of our own.  However, I think picking her up from the airport will be a much more pleasurable experience than going to a hospital.  =)  These two can’t wait to meet her either!!

Adding to the family

Meet Emily, our soon to be daughter/ exchange student for 10-11 months.  Emily gets here in just over a month and we are SO excited to meet her in person!

I’m not quite sure where I got the idea to look in to hosting a foreign exchange student, but some time earlier this summer, the idea popped in to my head.  It probably has a lot to do with us missing the culture of living in Europe and if we can’t live over there and expose our kids to different cultures that way, the next best way is to bring different cultures to us!  So that’s what we’re doing.

Honestly, the whole time I was going through this process of applying to be a host family I was still on the fence about it.  My family hosted LOTS of people – kids, adults and everything in between – from all over the place (Japan, Russia, Germany, etc) when I was growing up, but they were always for shorter periods of time, usually a few days to maybe a few weeks.  Mark’s family hosted a high school student from Spain when he was 7 years old and we actually went and stayed with Mercedes in Madrid when we visited Spain in 2008.  So neither of us is new to the experience of hosting, but it is different when your parents are hosting versus you being the hosts.  Mark and I talked it over a few times, pretty casually, and we were interested in getting more info on it, but weren’t 100% convinced that we had the time and energy to devote to hosting a student.

I put a message out on FB to see if anyone had any experience with hosting a student and we got some good and positive feedback from that.  Everyone that responded had said that it was a great experience for them.  Mark was actually the one that was convinced first and thought we should do it.  We went through the application process of filing out a bunch of paperwork and giving references and then had to do an in-home interview with an Ayusa (the program we found Emily through) rep.  At this point I still wasn’t 100% convinced so I asked the rep a lot of questions to try to get a better handle on what we would be in for.  After the meeting with the rep we were approved and could start looking at student profiles and I think it was at that time that I really got excited about hosting. 

We looked through TONS of profiles for the students.  We knew we wanted a girl with similar interests to ours and originally we were thinking we wanted a girl from Germany since Mark speaks a little German and studied there for a year.  However, I looked at girl’s profiles from all over Western Europe, which is how I came across Emily.  One of my biggest reservations about hosting was having such an age difference between our kids and the student.  I wasn’t sure high schoolers would be okay with having two little ones as siblings, so when I saw in Emily’s profile that she loved kids and wants to teach little ones some day, I knew she would be a good fit.

So Emily is 16 years old and she’s from The Netherlands.  She loves to dance and ride horses, along with riding bikes and cooking.  She has a twin sister and Emily seems very social and energetic.  The people that interviewed her for the program said she is very friendly and happy.  She said she likes to talk, which is great, because so do I.  We have been emailing her for a few weeks now and every email we get just makes us more and more excited to meet her in person.

I’ve also been in contact with her mom, Ilse, a bit.  I am sad for her family, her mom especially, since I know exactly how I’d feel if I was saying goodbye to my own daughter for 11 months.  And it’s got to be extra scary for them since they really don’t know us at all and they’ve never been to AZ.  They have seen my blog and our FB pages, and I think those are a pretty good representation of who we are, but I still couldn’t imagine shipping my daughter to a foreign country for almost a year at 16 years old by herself.  So I am sad and nervous for Emily’s family but I’m so happy for them too, because I know we’ll take good care of her and do everything we can to make sure her time in the USA is as enjoyable as possible.  I’ve been busy getting our guest room turned in to Emily’s room by repainting it and refinishing furniture.  We bought a desk off of Craigslist that we are going to fix up and refinish for her and I think it’ll look great when it’s all said and done and I hope she’ll like it.

So in a month, we will be a family of five and we couldn’t be more excited about it!  Abbie keeps asking when her big sister is going to get here.  =)