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.