Friday, October 2, 2009

Our fifth son!

We now are the proud host parents of a foreign exchange student from Brazil! He came to us on September 15th, around 2pm, at a tall 6'2"-ish, and 16 years old. His name is Leo.

How did we end up hosting an exchange student, you ask? Well, a woman in our neighborhood works for a organization that places exchange students, and she asked me if we were interested- not once, not twice, but three times! The first two times, I pretty quickly said "no" thinking it would just be too difficult with 4 kids of our own and a foreign exchange student shoved into 2 bedrooms, plus I figured Nate wouldn't be interested (which he initially wasn't). But, the third time's the charm, and we agreed (Nate was surprisingly easy to convince). Initially, we were going to host a student that needed to be relocated due to being in a bad situation, but that had some issues that took some time to resolve, so we were sent a list of other students that needed new host families asap. When I saw that there was a boy from Brazil on the list, I knew Nate would want him to be the one to join our family for the next year, so I let Kristene know (our neighborhood friend), filled out all the paperwork and the rest all happened pretty quick- only about a week from agreeing to host to Leo's arrival.

Here's Leo:



We love having Leo living with us! The boys love having an older brother and Leo said that his favorite thing about being here is having brothers (he only has a 3-year-old sister).

So, do you want to host a foreign exchange student? There's always more kids that need a Host Family.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

School Pictures Are Here!!!

Overall, I can't complain about how the boys' pictures turned out. Jefferson's hair didn't stay put, Jackson's freckles kind-of make his face look dirty, and Mason was quite a challenge- just getting him to stand in front of the camera was difficult, and he was doing everything he could to not look at the camera or smile, so the fact that the photographer somehow managed to get a picture of him looking towards the camera without his eyes scrunched shut and his mouth in a frown was a miracle!