Do you think in English?

At any given time there are any given number of children at our house.  So, we figured, what's one more?  We have sponsored cadets from the Coast Guard Academy for a number of years and are used to having a house full of people so when a cry for help appeared on Facebook from a friend seeking a host family for an exchange student I said "I got this"!  I was then contacted by a lovely woman From PAX named Deb Evans who is the Community Coordinator for the state of Connecticut.  She came by the next day to meet us and check out our house and the following Friday we picked up a beautiful young lady from Germany at the train station in New London.  Sounds easy, right?  Well, it is!  I mean, I had to get our spare bedroom de-cluttered and ready for someone to actually live in for 5 months. I had been wanting to do this for the past 3 years so this was a great catalyst for me to get in motion and get 'er done!  We were in "all hands on deck" mode for a week, getting everything ready for our new family member.  Other than filling out an online application and submitting pictures of the inside and outside of our home that was really all we had to do.

Our 13 year old daughter was excited to meet her new "sister" and made her a large sign to bring to the station to welcome her.  The train stopped, and off walked a tall, beautiful, blonde 15 year old girl with a bright pink suitcase (my FAVORITE color) and she came over and hugged us immediately.  The sign was a success and did it's job!  It was a busy weekend when she arrived, full of parties and a get-together at a friend's house at the lake so our girl didn't have much time to relax...welcome to our life!  At some point that weekend, our daughter and her friends were talking to our new girl and they asked, "Do you think in English"?  I laughed and told them that they were silly, but when Anna answered she said "Not yet, but I hope that soon I will"!  I realized, it wasn't a silly question at all.  These girls were asking all kinds of questions about her town, what Germany is like, what food they have, what kind of houses they have, what their school is like, what kind of clothes they wear...I don't know who was more interested in learning about the other's culture! 

For us, it has been a seamless transition.  Anna has fit in with our family as though she has been here all along.  It has been an extremely busy week since she's been here with parties, trips to the lake, school starting, and a Maroon 5 concert.  There hasn't been much down time to relax with another busy weekend on our calendar and many more this month.  The girls are both very athletic and running cross country at their schools so that also will keep all of us busy for the next couple of months and then basketball starts for our daughter.  Once everything settles down we will have more time to relax...and sleep.  As Shakespeare said, "To sleep, perchance to dream"...in English?

If you would like more information about how you can be a host family for an exchange student visit www.pax.org.
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