Family Thais

Final Wrap Up

2011-07-05T18:38:00.001-07:00

It has been more than a week since we dropped Penny off at the departure site and bid her farewell. It has been interesting finding our new normal around here without her, just like it was interesting getting into the swing of things when she first arrived. There have been a lot of moments of sadness, and it’s almost shocking how much free time I have now, but of course, I would much prefer to be busy still!

We have heard from Penny and from her mom. We were debating what to send back to Thailand as a gift to the family, and finally we decided on a wind chime we found in the Lillian Vernon catalog. I can’t find it in their online store, but I think it was meant more as a memorial thing after someone died than as a Bon Voyage. However, we felt the sentiment worked well anyway. The front of the hanging bit looks like this:

It reads: “Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. I will always remember you.” The back was engrave-able, so we decided to have our names and AFS engraved on it, which came out looking like this:

Penny posted a photo of it on Facebook a few days ago, as it is flying from their home:

And her mom sent along a note that read, “Thank you very much for your present. We hanged it on the 2nd floor, very near to where I am writing this email. The tinkle is thunderous when (Dad) holds it. After hanging up, the sound is melodious. We had three small ones around the house, the sound is uncomparable to yours.”

I think this means they like it!

Otherwise, Penny reports that she is helping her brother learn some more English, as he is about to start at a private school in Kentucky for high school this year. He is coming as just an international student, not an exchange student, and will attend for several years to earn an American high school diploma. We have invited him to spend his Christmas vacation with us this year, but whether or not he will remains to be seen! Penny’s younger sister also recently sat for the scholarship exam that Penny won to get a full scholarship for an AFS year abroad, but according to Penny did not do well at all.

Penny has a ton of free time until she goes back to school in November, so she plans to use it studying English and taking the TOEFL again, as well as enjoying time with her friends and family. She says she really misses us, and we really miss her, so I have a feeling we’ll be in each other’s lives for a long time to come.

Meanwhile, I am so happy to report that a bunch of us host moms from this year are planning “AFS Host Moms Camp” for this fall! Four or five us are planning on taking a long weekend together in Las Vegas!!! I’m super excited about it—these ladies have been an awesome source of support to me all year and I hope I’ve supported them as well. I’m also really excited that one of them is coming from halfway across the country to Virginia to visit family and we will be meeting up in August in person!

Many thanks also to all my family and friends who listened to me all year as I struggled to parent a teenager for the first time. It was a challenge for us and I know it was probably a challenge for you all after a while. I’m sure it’s hard to believe when I say how worth it this whole experience was and how it grew and changed our family for the better, but it is true, and I would do it again in a heartbeat, even if the entire year remained the same. But maybe next time I won’t need to rely on you all so much and your compassionate ears! We’re experienced parents of a teen now, after all!

So thus endeth the blog, I do believe. A new crop of students will arrive to new families and the stories will be theirs to tell next year. I hope some of them do. We so enjoyed our year as a host family—it was stressful at times, but like any family relationships, it was worth the effort.

AFS USA is still actively seeking host families for next year, so it’s not too late if you are interested in hosting! Please visit http://www.afsusa.org/host-family for more information, to indicate your interest in hosting, to learn about the countries from which you can host, and read about other families who have hosted students. As I’ve said before, there is no typical host family—black, white, gay, straight, one parent, two parents, children, no children, teens, young children, anyone can apply! The benefits are numerous, but as one of my fellow host moms this year summed it up best in a Facebook status: “Hosting makes your world smaller and your heart bigger.”

I have nothing else I can possibly add to that statement, and so I bid you farewell and invite you to visit my other blog to keep up with our family’s adventures (http://katekosior.blogspot.com/)!

Departure

2011-06-30T05:41:00.001-07:00

Once the party was picked up and everything put away, it was time to focus on the fact that Penny was really and truly leaving. We had all had moments in the past weeks where we were all getting pretty teary eyed—once we were standing in line somewhere and I just patted Penny’s back. She asked me what I was doing and I told her I was holding onto her while I still could. We both got a little weepy.

So Sunday, we spent as much time together as was absolutely possible. We played last games of “I’m going to get that baby!”, a game Penny and I had invented for Leah where one of us held her and the other chased the two of them in circles around the living room/dining room/kitchen while Leah shrieked and laughed. We did last minute packing, or so I thought. I wound up having to take my buddy Joe home early, since he got a migraine, and when I got back, we had a nice dinner out and then watched The Princess Bride, all four of us.

Monday morning, Penny was freaking out because she couldn’t fit everything in her bags. She had flatly refused to spend money to ship anything whatsoever, and she had also spent months building up a supply of junk food to take home with her. Half of one suitcase was filled with cookies, candy, crackers, nuts, etc. Finally she came to the conclusion that she couldn't fit it all, so she abandoned a box of Ritz crackers, her Pringles (about 600 chips by the looks of it, all tucked in a Ziploc bag—they would have been crumbs by the time they got to Thailand), and her Chips Ahoy cookies (also in a Ziploc bag, about 200 of them).

Finally, she asked me for help getting things put in her suitcases, and I made her make some tough choices. Her favorite sneakers that had holes in the bottom went, as did 2 other pairs of shoes. Scarf and gloves that she has no use for in Thailand are gone. Sweaters and blankets are no more. There was some crying over the scarf (“But my friend gave me that!”), but I pointed out that she had another scarf in her suitcase that I hadn’t made her get rid of, and so she had to choose between the two. All the DVDs were removed from big cases and put into a sleeve. She had to abandon her iCarly DSi game boxes. What with one thing and another, we finally got everything put together. She did leave behind things that I would have found more important than Pepperidge Farm cookies—the autographed book from Paul Burrell, cards that friends and family had given her. She asked what I was going to do with her room when she was gone and I said it would go back to being a guest room, but I wasn’t keeping things indefinitely and it was not turning into a Penny Museum.

Then I made her take her bags to the car, just like she would have to in the airport, although this time through the obstacle of toys in the backyard. She was pretty upset with me and informed me that there wouldn't be toys to go through in the airport, but I pointed out there would be hundreds of people and she wouldn’t be able to just abandon one bag and go back for it. Finally, she got her stuff into the car, and we all sat in the living room and tucked into a bag of Lindt truffles that her friend, Taylor, had given her.

We left at about 12 noon, stopped to copy her report card for AFS, and then headed to McLean to drop her off and say our final goodbyes. It was a tearful ride up for me (every try driving when you’re crying and trying not to cry? It’s not easy!), and Penny said she was trying not to cry her eyes out while we went. It was definitely rough. We discussed our year and she thanked us again for giving her the opportunity to stay and prove herself and we told her she had done a great job.

We got to the drop off location and Penny gave her stuff to AFS Volunteer Paul, who was manning the luggage truck (They had gotten a Uhaul!). Another volunteer informed us we had 5 minutes, and despite my earlier sentiment in the day that it would be better to rip off the band aid and just be done with goodbye, suddenly only having a few final moments together sucked. Penny asked us to go out to the car so we would have a little privacy instead of standing around with the other kids and their families, and so we did. She put Leah in her carseat, hugged and kissed her, and the tears were really flowing. We shared a family hug, she hugged Mike hard and helped him into his seat, while he was busy assuring her that we love her and are proud of her, and then she walked me to my side of the car and I hugged her until I couldn’t hug her any more. Through our tears, I told her I loved her and to be a good girl and she swore she’d call from Thailand and she loved us. I got in the car, and that was that. We left her there, crying in the street, as we drove slowly away. I couldn’t even bring myself to look in the rearview mirror. (And I didn’t take pictures—we were all a mess and there just wasn’t time anyway!)

On the way up, she asked why I was crying and I said I hated myself for driving her up there and away from us. That was nothing compared to how much I hated myself for driving away from her. But there was nothing else to be done—we had to say goodbye, and we always knew this day was coming. It’s part of the experience, and despite the fact that it is now Thursday and I am crying as I type this, it does get easier and as we told her, “it’s not good-bye, it’s just see you next time!”

So we got home and Monday night I spent the evening stacking her belongings in the closet in that room and changing the blanket on the bed. The room is now basically empty, which has helped Leah make the transition to understanding that Penny is gone. She has done really remarkably well—she is living the dream as an only child again and center of our attention. She asks for Penny every day, but seems satisfied with, “Penny went bye bye” or “Penny went to see her mommy” and there are no tears, we just move on to the next thing.

Last night I stayed up, tracking Penny’s flight, until I saw it safely landed in Bangkok. There was a definite sense of it ending, and a few friends on Facebook this morning put “Welcome back” on her page, so she must be there. I know we will hear from her again, and we’ve kept busy, so it’s easy enough to be patient.

And thus endeth our year. We are now officially a “former host family” and a very proud one at that. I’m still somewhat numb and can only explain it like as if someone had cut off a finger—nothing life threatening has happened, but I definitely have to get used to living a little bit differently. We all miss our girl, but we’re doing fine. Who knows what adventures will follow!

Good Bye Party

2011-06-28T18:08:00.001-07:00

Penny has been gone for a day, impossible as it seems!!! I will write more on that later, but for now, I wanted to put up some pictures from her goodbye party. We had a backyard BBQ party on Saturday and invited a pile of people from the neighborhood, school, and friends and family to come and say good bye one last time. Penny decided to cook Thai food for everyone, so she made her awesome green curry and Suki noodles (which I am going to MISS like CRAZY!). In addition, we had hot dogs, potato and macaroni salad, a pineapple peach casserole, shrimp dip, french onion dip, crackers, and chips. The piece de resistance, as far as Penny and her girlfriends were concerned was the chocolate fountain I set up—something I had left over from my sister’s wedding and which I LOVE to pull out as often as I can, which thus far as been my sister’s wedding, Leah’s welcome to the family party, and now Penny’s good bye. Penny had so much fun choosing the dippers for the fountain, but ultimately we decided on pound cake, cheese cake, pretzels, strawberries, bananas, brownies, and rice krispies treats.

We also found out that Walmart had a 1 hour banner printing service, so we had a special banner printed up for her and she decided to ask everyone to sign it. We also had a table set up with cards and stickers and stuff so that everyone could make her a card to go in a photo album. Both were a great success and she got a lot of beautiful sentiments from both.

The party started at 6pm, and we had about 30 people or so over. Penny’s best friends all came, so we had a lot of squealing and giggling that lasted till nearly 11pm, when it turned to tears and hugs and promises to keep in touch. There’s not much else to say, so I’ll just post pictures of Penny with everyone for you to enjoy, and make comments as appropriate underneath each one. When I can even think about it without tearing up, I’ll write a post about D-Day, the day she left!

The assembled crowd

We made Penny give a little speech. She said, “I know I’m not gonna have such a great year without everyone here.”

With our friends, The Harrisons

With JB, who was her homecoming date, and his dad, Dave. They live just up the street from us.

With our neighbors, the Summers family. Baby Fred was born while Penny was here and she was able to hold him when he was only 6 hours old. Lisa attempted to turn Penny Greek by feeding her lots of stuffed grape leaves and teaching her to make Greek New Year’s Bread this year.

Our neighbors, Sherri and Mark. We recently became friendly with them and they are very interested in going to Thailand and loved getting to know Penny.

Penny with my brother-in-law Lucas, nephew “Chunk”, dearest friend Joe, sister Judy, and niece “Dot Dot”

Penny with our friends, the Tompkinses. Kristine and I were co-workers when I was still working.

Penny was so happy, she decided to dance.

Penny with some of our best friends, Melissa, Emily, and Andy

Penny and Emily

Penny with our dear friends and frequent dinner dates, the Kosnoskis

Penny with the Blind Guy Squad, Andrew Tompkins and Mike

An awesome picture of us with our girl

Penny and her girlfriends Taylor, Lesley, Charlie, Chrissy, and Beth

Penny and our friend Cindy

The girls enjoying the chocolate fountain. They were starting to get silly and Dot wanted out! :0D

Thanks to everyone who came, and to those who sent their sentiments along who were unable to make it. It was a special day for Penny and I know she felt so loved and so special!

New York, New York

2011-06-27T18:09:00.001-07:00

So, part of Penny’s “probation” came with the promise that if she behaved herself, I would take her to NYC at the end of her stay. I had originally been planning to take her at the beginning of June but figured she wouldn’t have much incentive to “be good” afterwards, so I decided I would take her at the end. I consulted with my friend, Melissa, who is my back up momma for Leah and she was finishing school as a first grade teacher this past week and would be happy to mind Leah for us while we went to NYC. So we decided to go on Thursday, June 23rd. Due to a bunch of financial considerations, we decided to cut the trip down to 1 full day instead of two, and when checking Amtrak for cheap tickets, the cheapest I could get were to leave at either 3 or 4 AM and get back to DC at 1AM. I chose leaving at 4AM, only as it would provide a LITTLE bit of extra sleep, and booked our tickets. Penny had two goals in mind: Statue of Liberty and Chinatown. Beyond that, she was leaving it up to me.

I went to college in NYC, and so it was a tough choice as to which of the ten million things people want to see when they think of NY that I could squeeze into just one day. And also bearing in mind Penny’s interests and being sensitive to her desire to stay out of the sun. I made an ambitious plan that basically involved us starting south and heading north from the Statue of Liberty to Ground Zero to Chinatown, and then heading north to 72nd Street to see Strawberry Fields and Gray’s Papaya, then walking south to Lincoln Center, Central Park, 5th Avenue, Times Square, and finally the Empire State Building. It was not to be, but I did things I hadn’t planned on and only missed the stops at 72nd Street, so I feel pretty good about what we accomplished!

We dropped Leah off at Melissa’s on Wednesday night and then headed up to my sister’s house to bunk down on the floor for a few hours. My sister lives only about 20 minutes from DC’s Union Station, so it was the smart thing to do—getting up at 3AM instead of 2:00 here at home and driving up. The alarm went off at 3, just as Penny was having a nightmare, so that scared her a bit, but we were ready and out the door at 3:15 and made it to the train station in no time. We managed to snag a nice face-to-face section of 4 seats in a quiet car, where my toddler is typically not allowed, and stretched out to try and get a bit more sleep. Penny was too excited to sleep, and I had a new Janet Evanovich book to read, so neither of us slept much, although she did sleep some, and I managed to doze. The train got stuck in Secaucus for about 40 minutes, so we got to NY at 8:00 instead of 7:15, and so rather than dilly-dallying to get breakfast somewhere, I ushered us along to the subway to South Ferry.

Initially Penny said she only wanted to see the Statue of Liberty, she didn’t really care if we actually took the boat over to Liberty Island. However, New York and fate had other plans for us—it was an absolutely MISERABLE day, hot and wet and foggy, and when we go to South Ferry, we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces, much less the statue! So I went up to the ticket booth and inquired if they had pedestal tickets, as the Statue’s website indicates you need to reserve your tickets to the pedestal a couple of weeks in advance and I didn’t really want to pay to go over to Liberty Island if we weren’t going to go inside the statue. There were tickets available, however, and because it was such a miserable day and we couldn’t see anything, we decided to put forth the money and go over to Liberty Island.

Due to the weather, the boat ride over was absolutely miserable. The boat rocked and bucked us around a great deal and people were pushing and shoving to get up on the top deck of the boat for what there was of a view. It was hot, I was already sweating, and I was feeling seasick. As we rolled past Ellis Island, it gave me a new appreciation for immigrants like my great-grandparents who endured similar journeys to get to our shores and made me think about Penny’s upcoming two day airplane journey back to Thailand and all she went through to get to us in the first place! Finally we got close enough to the Statue that we could see her and some people on the right side of the boat were kind enough to let us have their spots so we could grab pictures.

Once on the island, I issued Penny a stern warning about disappearing where I couldn’t see her, and she promptly took off without me, me screaming at her to get back to where I was. I then remembered my own 18-year-old self, fresh out of the mountains and let loose in NYC and considered my parents pretty darned brave to let their kid go live in the city by herself because my kid was going nowhere without me. I corralled Penny over to the line for the pedestal and after checking my backpack and clearing security, we were inside the museum, where we saw the original torch and took pictures with some replicas.

We got on line to go up, and Penny was extremely impatient. I kept telling her to breathe and relax, that we would be up there in no time, but she was really, really antsy. Finally we got to the top of the pedestal, just under the feet, and made our way outside, and she began screaming her head off and shaking that we were so high up in the air and she was terrified and wanted to get down. KIDS! Sheesh! So here she is, hugging the wall and refusing to go anywhere that she wasn’t pressed directly against it. I tried the old, “You’re young! You have the rest of your life to be scared!” thing, but it was clear she was having none of it, so we started back down the stairs and went to the next level down.

This did not help any, she still felt we were way too high in the air! I was dying to see the NYC skyline, and this is the great picture I got of it:

Yup. You can faintly see some buildings in there somewhere, but it was pretty much a bust. So we went down to the base of the statue, reclaimed our bags and walked around the bottom to get some pictures.

By this time, there was a boat docked and there wouldn’t be another one for 30 minutes, so we decided to get on that boat and head off. We got to Ellis Island and I explained what it was and asked her if she would like to see it, but she’s not much of a museum type, so it didn’t appeal to her at all. (one of the advantages of going to college in NYC is that going to Ellis Island was actually a homework assignment for me my freshman year. I found the place fascinating and could have spent the day there, but it’s not my trip, so we did not disembark!)

Our next stop was going to be Ground Zero. Penny wasn’t entirely clear on what had happened there, given that she was not quite 9 when it happened, but she had heard about it and I had shown her pictures of the old skyline and some pictures of what happened and she thought it would be a good thing to see. I had last been there a few years ago when I led a group of conference participants to Ground Zero when I was attending a conference at Helen Keller National Center on Long Island. So I was interested to see how it was changing and what was new. Also, due to the fact we had yet to eat anything and it was nearly 11:00, I wanted to find some pizza! Unfortunately, I got busy talking to Penny while we were on the train, so I missed our stop and we had to get out and walk to Ground Zero from a bit further away. But eventually we found a subway station nearby and decided to hop back on and ride to the stop we needed. (In retrospect, even though it was only 1 stop, I am SO glad we did it! We walked SO HARD and SO FAR Thursday, I was sore for a couple of days!)

The rain started by then, and I snapped a quick picture of Penny from the sidewalk. You can see there is a lot of construction going on around there now, and sadly to me at least, there are a lot of hawkers down there trying to get you to buy books and pins and hats and crap about 9/11. I politely pushed two of them away and then put on my NYC game face and we were left alone. We looked around a bit and then as I had walking directions to Chinatown from Ground Zero, we decided to start walking.

About halfway there, I was thinking we were seriously lost. We’d gone a good number of blocks and not found Canal Street and we were hot, wet, and tired already. Thankfully, out of the blue like a beacon shone Star Pizza, and we stopped in for Penny’s first NY pizza experience. I taught her how to fold it before you eat it, and we guzzled down beverages as if we hadn’t had a drink in months. Thus refreshed, we headed to Chinatown, which took us another 20 minutes or so worth of walking before we finally found it (FIE ON YOU, Chinatown website that made it sound like a quick and easy stroll!)

Penny asked me what I wanted to do there and I answered honestly that I had never been and just brought her because she wanted to see it and to walk around and look at whatever she wanted to do. She wanted to eat something, and was a bit disappointed that most of the stores were jewelry and souvenir stores. Eventually we happened upon a restaurant with ducks hanging in the window, which seemed to indicate some authenticity in everyone’s minds and so we went into Sun Sai Gai restaurant and were immediately screamed at by any number of old Chinese men who were moving briskly and efficiently around the place, filling empty seats, taking order, throwing tea, and slinging food that was coming up the dumbwaiter. Penny knows Chinese and was laughing at whatever they were yelling, but I have no idea what was going on. Eventually we ordered—she got duck soup and I got some kind of Cantonese noodles—and we dug in almost immediately.

Penny was in heaven, assuring me that everything was absolutely authentic and truly it was unlike any Chinese food I have eaten in the US, so I am inclined to believe her! :) It was absolutely delicious, we shared each other’s dishes and I’m so glad I tried her soup, even if it was way too hot for soup! By the time we finished lunch, it was POURING down rain, so I decided to modify the route. There was an N train right outside and we hopped on and headed for Times Square to go to Madame Tussaud’s, one of the few indoor activities I had planned for us.

I could not have chosen an activity that was a bigger hit with Penny. From the moment we got to the first room, she was squealing, running around, camera and umbrella flying, “Take me a picture!” issuing from her mouth every 3.2 seconds. She didn’t even know who half the “people” were who were displayed, she was just embraced in the sheer joy and excitement of the thing and wanted it all captured. Her favorite figures were Capt. Jack Sparrow and Rob Pattinson, but she LOVED all of the figures. We spent over 2 hours in the museum, and she never went past a single figure that I didn’t snap her picture. We participated in the 4D movie experience that was included, and it was cute, and at least a chance to sit for a few minutes, as I knew we were about to do some serious amounts of walking.

When we got back outside, we found that the rain had stopped, so we rolled on back to Times Square and I grabbed a couple of pictures of her up there. There wasn’t a whole lot going on, although we were accosted by some guys from a Beatles tribute band. It was a pretty miserable day, so the lights were shining pretty well, which was good since we didn’t wind up going back at night, which I know was a bit disappointing, but still we were just exhausted by that point.

Anyway, we walked and walked and cut over towards Fifth Avenue, since I wanted Penny to see Radio City Music Hall and the NBC studios before we got to Rockefeller Center. We hit both those stops pretty quickly, since we didn’t have a tour of the studios lined up and just walked past Radio City en route.

The first thing Penny noticed at Rockefeller Center was the flags of all nations and we were immediately on a quest to find the Thai flag. Thankfully she spotted it in pretty short order and was more impressed by that than she was by the statue and the center itself!

Across the street from Rockefeller Center is the famous St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and I wanted to show her that. It had the added advantage of being indoors and out of the weather and she was fully impressed by the beauty and peace of the place, as I had expected her to be.

After I felt compelled to say a prayer and did so, we both decided we were having bathroom emergencies, so we hightailed it up 5th Ave. until we came to a Forever 21, Penny’s favorite store. There were 4 bathrooms listed on the store directory, and every single one of them was out of order. We browsed for a while, and then made an unintended stop over at Trump Tower, hoping to find a public restroom in there. Nope, nada! But I got a fun picture of Penny on the escalator and she was impressed to be in Trump’s building, since she had heard of him!

(See those bags under Penny’s eyes? We were feeling the strain!)

Upon not finding a bathroom at Trump’s place, we kept walking and finally got to FAO Schwartz, where I knew for a fact there were restrooms. I directed her through traffic to the restrooms, and once satisfied, we had a look around. We were both really disappointed at how little Hello Kitty stuff was there, and by and large, I was really disappointed in how much the place had changed and how it had just turned into a giant toy store instead of the wonderland it used to be. So we left with nothing to show for it except for a packet of Asian grape candies and a cool picture we snapped outside as we were leaving—probably one of my two favorites I took of Penny in New York (the other will be the last photo on this post!).

We crossed the street to see the Ai WeiWei sculptures outside the Plaza Hotel. There are 12 animal heads representing the 12 signs of the Chinese Zodiac. Little did I know, Mr. Ai is being detained by the Chinese government, so as cool as the sculptures are, I felt like a bit of a bad ass taking my good girl Thai student to see the art of someone the Chinese consider a dissident.

The statues are generic, but beautiful, and fit my sensibilities in what I like in art, and it was fun to find the monkey (Penny’s sign) and the rabbit (mine).

From there, we headed for a stroll in Central Park, and our feet were killing us. Penny’s knees were starting to give in and we no sooner hit the park when she needed another bathroom break, so we pressed forward until we found one near a playground in the park. I sat outside while she went in and then we decided to take stock of our situation. It was about 6:00 at that point, and we were both hot, smelly, tired, and kind of over it! I asked Penny what more she wanted to, explained the two stops we hadn’t yet made on my itinerary, and we agreed to catch the 59th street subway to Lincoln Center and then head back to 34th Street.

We literally got off the train, took the picture, and got back on the train. While we were heading back south, Penny asked me if I knew where we could get famous NY black and white cookies, so we decided that would be our new quest. I asked her about going to the top of the Empire State Building, which is something that in my “old age” I really would like to do, but upon discussing it, and based on how freaked out she was at the Statue of Liberty, we decided against it. Still, she wanted to see it, so we got down there and started walking in that direction. Looking up at the building, I knew we made the right decision, since the top of it was encased in fog. We wouldn’t have seen much of anything at all.

And so we went inside and took a picture of Penny in the lobby and decided to go find better pizza than we had already eaten. This time, we stumbled upon Little Italy pizza, definitely a step up from Star Pizza, but definitely not the best pizza I’ve eaten in NY. Penny was thrilled to see everyone else folding their pizza in half to eat it, and I think she felt a bit like a NYer that day while she emulated everyone else’s style.

We wandered to a few places looking for cookies—Starbucks, Manhattan Mall—but nothing jumped out at us, so we decided to try our luck at the many eateries in Penn Station and in the very first one we went to, we had success!!!! I bought us each a cookie and me a bottle of water, and we found the Amtrak waiting area and parked our butts. It was 7:30, and we were officially exhausted. Our train wasn’t leaving till 10:00, but we sat there and played games on my iPod until our train was called. We got back in the quiet car and then Penny fell asleep. I wasn’t able to sleep much, unfortunately, and was awake most of the trip, dozing fitfully here and there while waiting to get home to DC. Thankfully the train ran on time and we got back to DC right at about 1:15AM, and were in the car and ready to roll by 1:30.

Unfortunately, VDOT decided to do overnight roadwork and 95 South was down to 1 lane, so we were stuck in traffic! I was so upset, overtired, I just started cursing a blue streak. Penny woke up long enough to ask, “What’s going on?” and then pass back out. By the time we got home at 3AM, I could barely make it up the steps, and Penny and I stood on the front walk, giggling, while I seriously debated crawling. I made it up the steps and up to the second floor of the house, bid Penny good night, and passed out cold until 9AM when my neighbor decided to mow his lawn. AUGH! I felt cursed! I laid in bed, chatting to my husband on the phone for about an hour, relaying our adventures, and then got ready to face Friday.

It really was an amazing trip, I’m so glad I took Penny and we got to see so much stuff and do so many things. I hope she’ll never forget it, since I know I never will!

Travels and Passages

2011-06-20T20:57:00.001-07:00

In the nearly 2 weeks since my last post, we have been BUSY! Most of the things I predicted we’d be doing have been done.

June 10, I followed through on my thoughts that we’d go out to Luray to visit the caverns. It was a great plan in that it gave us something cool and different to see and was underground where Penny wouldn’t have to worry about the sun. It was also nice and COOL down there, unlike above ground which has been sweltering!

We left in the morning, and got out to Luray in time for lunch. I decided we’d go and try to have lunch at a local restaurant and found the Artisan Grille, where we enjoyed fancy sandwiches before heading over to the caverns. Penny was disappointed that there wasn’t any blackberry ice cream, something she had LOVED when she went hiking on Skyline Drive with Melissa back in May, so we didn’t have dessert, but we had a great lunch nonetheless. It was only about a mile from the entrance to the caves, so the location was great and it had stairs that Leah insisted on running up and down, so Penny and I got our exercise!

There was something in the cavern air, because the minute we got underground, Leah took a look around, declared it “WEIRD!” at the top of her lungs, and proceeded to scream (there’s an awesome echo in caves) and run wild. Penny and I were wiped out by the end of the tour, but Leah had an absolute ball and slept all the way home! The caves were beautiful—I had been once in 1995, and had pictures but to see them in person is absolutely incredible.

Penny declared them “awesome” in stark contrast to Leah’s “weird” and we enjoyed the challenge of getting a decent picture of her that didn’t either obliterate her or obliterate the scenery. This is one miraculous good one in which both are visible.

June 11, we did go up to her AFS liaison’s home for a good-bye party. It seems early, but April, her liaison, is actually traveling to Sweden to see her exchange student from last year and won’t be back till after Penny leaves. It was a really nice time, and April gave all 3 girls stuffed animals with jackets that had their names and AFS Virginia and the dates embroidered on them. Penny’s is packed and ready to go, it was a really sweet gesture and a beautiful keepsake.

Penny did go to lunch with the Thai worker and to the honors lunch in Stafford, but there’s not much to report about either other than that they did give Penny a medal at the luncheon, which she doesn’t really know what it was for. She was just happy to have something special to wear at her graduation ceremony. We had a nice surprise Wednesday night in that we had been talking to our neighbors down the street and it turns out they LOVE Thai food and want to go to Thailand, so we all decided to go to a local Thai restaurant for dinner and they wound up taking us out. We had a lovely time and they practically begged us to let them take Leah on graduation day so that we could just enjoy Penny’s ceremony!

After her first graduation rehearsal, her friends Ben and Amanda took her up to Tyson’s Corner for a day of shopping, which made up for the fact that Penny decided she didn’t want to go all the way to Fair Oaks mall after all, particularly since the Thai lady took her to Potomac Mills for a day. Maybe she has finally had her fill of malls?! I doubt it though!

We also took a trip to the local mall for a bit of a time out for mom—Penny had 90 minutes to herself to wander and shop and Leah got checked into the local drop in day care and I hid out in the bookstore that’s closing and went for broke—spend $30 on over $100 worth of books. We had lunch outside afterwards and my spirits were revived! So I decided to teach Penny some no bake baking, as her family does not own an oven at home. I taught her microwave fudge and no bake cookies, both of which were a hit! I would like to teach her to bake in a cardboard box, but I’m having a difficult time getting my hands on a paper box.

Saturday was graduation day. Penny wore her mystery medal with such pride. We had to be at the school at 6:45, but I swear she was glowing. I was so proud during the whole thing and just felt super teary eyed and proud mama-ish, I know I will be an absolute BASKET CASE in 16 years when it’s Leah’s turn!

Penny was thrilled that a number of her friends attended her ceremony as well. Her best friend, Lesley (bel0w), and friend Stephanie were waiting when I went down to the parents’ picture line to snag a picture of her receiving her diploma and her friends Charlie and Chrissy were also there, although we missed seeing them somewhere.

When we got home, my dad had arrived with my niece and nephew and we had a big pizza lunch (when making out a shopping list for the week ahead, Penny said she didn’t want any pizza at all this week! Too bad, we’re going to NYC and I already told her all we’re eating is pizza!) to celebrate before she headed off to a party at her math teacher’s house.

That evening we had a chocolate cake to celebrate, Mike and I gave Penny an iCarly game for her DSi as a graduation gift, and then we played lots of Yahtzee and cards until all of us collapsed, exhausted from all the emotions of the day and from chasing 3 toddlers around!

The next day we had a BBQ for Father’s Day and gave my dad and Mike each mugs that Penny and Leah had painted together. It was a fun project to work on and something both dads can have to remember the girls. My dad finally was able to leave to go back to my sister’s around 5pm, which was really hard on Penny. See this picture?

This is Leah and my niece, Dot, staring up at my dad in absolute adoration, which is how everyone stares at my dad, and Penny was no exception. She doesn’t have a grandfather back in Thailand, and I think it really meant a lot to her to have the experience of having a very involved “PopPop” who was around for many of the big events of her year. She held tight to him and cried her eyes out before he left, and he told her he was proud of her and she had done a hard thing and could be proud of herself for the rest of her life, which thus made me lose it, and Leah lose it after Penny and I were crying. Sheesh!

This morning, we were up and out at 9am to go up to Baltimore, MD. I had taken Penny through there on our way to Rhode Island but we’d never made it up there to sightsee. The purpose of our visit was to see Leah’s birthmother and half sister and go to the Baltimore Aquarium, but also to let Penny see another Hard Rock Cafe. She’s now seen Ottawa, Boston, and Baltimore. We’re going to get NY and DC under our belts before all is said and done.

We met up with Leah’s BM/sis at 11:30 and went through the aquarium. Penny is not what you’d call a great fan of animals, so I think she was just going along for the ride, but she did a nice job of taking lots of pictures for us and I snapped a cute one of her in the rain forest area, where may I say, it was HOT!

So that’s where we are with a week to go. I sat down to make a grocery list tonight and let Penny choose all her favorite meals for the week, so we will be dining on kielbasa and pierogies, homemade boneless chicken wings, and spaghetti with Texas toast, in addition to whatever culinary delights we enjoy in NYC on Thursday and her BBQ/going away party on Saturday. We sat at the table making the list and Mike said, “I’m going to miss this. The evenings when Penny did the dishes were my time. I could ask her about school and we could talk.” And then he started to cry, and Penny started to cry, so I figured I might as well shed a tear or two. We’re a weepy family these days, but I’m trying to keep in mind the adage: Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened. And I know we will smile a LOT as we look back on these months together. I’m so glad we decided to do this. It’s been an unforgettable experience, so much more than I dared hope for.

See you all with a post on NYC and then a departure post before wrapping up the blog! :0D

Whirlwind!

2011-06-09T20:08:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was Penny’s last official day of school. She had a great day, finished on an X day, which she prefers to Y days, so that made her happy, she took lots of pictures with her friends and teachers, and failed her SOL test. Maybe she took us a bit too seriously when we told her, “Don’t stress out over it!”. So it’s possible she will have to take a history final but her teacher is going to try and wangle her an exemption since she had an A in the class all year. (He is also her favorite teacher, and speaks a bit of Thai—primarily curse words—so I expect she will not go take that test!). Penny has her last final tomorrow in government, and then she’s done!

Tuesday night, I decided we had all better sit down together and discuss our last 3 weeks together, or at least our last 3 weeks on this leg of our family adventure. Penny’s school has all kinds of wild exam schedules, she has luncheons and rehearsals and things to go to, she’s been making plans with friends, and we’re trying to do a few things as a family as well!

So, we all sat down together and Penny reported that on Monday, she walked all over our neighborhood and cried, wondering when she will ever get to come back here again. When she got home, she just stood in the backyard and sobbed. I wasn’t home, or I’d have given her a big hug. She was really excited in February that things were even beginning to wind down, but now that June is here, her emotions are much more mixed. As I said, “It’s one thing to want something to be over, it’s quite another to have it end.” And she agreed. And I think we’re all getting emotional. Today, I took the girls out (more on that in a bit) and I watched them playing together and I got teary-eyed to say the least!

Anyway, so we got out a pen and paper and worked out our schedule for the next 3 weeks. Here’s what it looks like:

June 10: Government final. She was supposed to go shopping with her buddy, Ben, but he canceled tonight, so that’s out. Now I am thinking that since her final is done at 9:40, I’ll pick her up and take her and Leah out to Luray Caverns. It’d be a nice little day trip and it’s underground so we don’t have to worry about being out in the sun.

June 11: We have an AFS picnic to go to in Stafford, and then her favorite TV show, iCarly, is having a 90 minute special that we MUST. BE. HOME. TO. WATCH.

June 12: There is a Thai woman who works in the school cafeteria who wants to take Penny to a nearby mall. Otherwise, we will be having a BBQ with my sister, which is happening with or without Penny.

June 13: Broadway night at her high school. Many of her friends are performing, and she’s excited to go.

June 14: The long awaited trip to Fair Oaks Mall and The Cheesecake Factory.

June 15: Honors luncheon in Stafford

June 16: Graduation rehearsal and long awaited trip to Tyson’s Corner with Ben.

June 17: Graduation rehearsal

June 18: Graduation!

June 19: Say goodbye to my dad, her PopPop, who she adores. I expect this is going to be a really tough day for her. It’s also Father’s Day, so we’ll be celebrating The Chief and she and I are going to plan something special for the day.

June 20: Trip up to Baltimore to see the Hard Rock Cafe and aquarium and meet Leah’s birthmother for lunch. I think this is going to be very meaningful for Penny and I hope helps her to understand the sacrifices parents make so that their children can have good lives. Maybe it will make her consider what her parents have done for her and how grateful she can and should be to them.

June 21, 22: Nothing yet! Hopefully she will begin packing!

June 23-24: We are hoping this is going to be our NYC trip. We’ve had some things happen around here that make it impossible for us to fully foot the bill for the NY trip and asked Penny to find out if her family would help pay for her train ticket. We haven’t heard back yet, but if so, we have agreed that she has done what we’ve asked her to do and deserves to see the city. Leah will stay with my good friend, Melissa, and Penny and I will head up to NYC. I can’t stop singing “N Y C! What is it about you?!” from “Annie”. I’m scrapping the plans for a hotel and Broadway show, instead planning on a hostel and Madame Tussaud’s, but I think we’re going to have a great trip anyway.

June 25: Good bye party. Her last chance to bid her friends from the year good bye.

June 26: Finish packing, probably a last tour of DC and Fredericksburg

June 27: Departure day. We drop Penny off at 1:30pm.

So as you can see, there are very few down days and the days are literally flying by. I’ve scrapped some plans, like Kings Dominion, because it’s been SO HOT here and also it would involve being out in the sun all day, which although Penny wants to go to an amusement park, she does not want to be outside. A real challenge. Some things still need to be squeezed in—our neighbor wants to go out for Thai food next week one night and some other friends want to head to the local Chinese buffet. Not sure when these will be, but we’ll make it happen.

Today she had a day off and no tests and when I asked her what she wanted to do, she said she just wanted to hang out with me. She wound up sleeping until almost noon, I think the stress of school having left her, so when Leah woke her up, she was shocked to see how late it was! We decided to take Leah and go to Chuck E. Cheese, which is one of the first places we ever took Penny to when she got here. We ripped through nearly 100 tokens and a pizza, got special “ID Cards” made—Penny is officially head cheerleader, I’m a member of a CSI team, and Leah is a hip hop dancer. I put several men to shame on the Nascar driving game—I made two scores in the top 5, how do ya like me now!? And Penny hit the jackpot on one of the ticket games, so we were proud of ourselves. We didn’t get enough tickets to do anything with, but they had an iCarly bag in the prize section, so I bought it for her, and she was over the moon about it.

So it looks like that’s how this thing is going to go down. I remember Monday thinking, “Wow! Three weeks!” and now the week is mostly over. There have been times I’ve thought this year would never end, but I just never thought it’d end this quickly!

We’ve had a few family pow wow sessions. Mike and I are both happy we stuck it out till the bitter end and didn’t send Penny home early. We’ve done a little review already and agreed that we could have been or perhaps should have been stricter, although Penny informed us over dinner on Tuesday that we are extremely strict. So that’s food for thought! We talked about how we didn’t really get a kid with whom at the end of the day we had a lot in common with and how it has been a challenge to keep that kid entertained when she hasn’t spent a lot of time with friends and such. Our philosophy now is, “You don’t necessarily get the kid you want, but you get the kid you need.” There are lessons both Mike and I needed to learn about patience, communication, openness, and parenting, and Penny taught us those, and AFS helped us along the way. Mike ran into our liaison on the train the other night and she asked, “How’s Penny?” Mike said, “Penny’s Penny!” to which April replied, “You guys are doing a great job. Don’t change a thing.” Those bits of encouragement have helped us immeasurably this year, and even though more than once I’ve thought, “What the heck am I doing!?” I don’t think I’ve ever once thought, “Why the heck am I still doing this?!”

We love this girl and we’re going to miss her. In my book, that equals success. Period.

Drawing to a Close…

2011-05-30T21:26:00.001-07:00

It’s hard to believe but in less than one month, our first year as an AFS host family will be over. I am really in shock, as I think about it, that there’s so little time left—4 weeks, just 28 little days, and it’s over and done. Sheesh!

I started working on a scrapbook for Penny last week. It contains lots of little odds and ends that haven’t had a place to live, so hopefully having everything in one book will be easier for her. She and I were looking through it and she asked me how I felt when I was working on it, did I feel sad? I was able to honestly answer her that no, I didn’t feel sad. The main thing I feel is proud. (This is Penny holding a picture of herself from the day she came into the US back in August. We were marveling at the changes—me in how much older she looks, her in how much longer her hair is!)

This has been an incredible experience in so many ways. I have been challenged as a person and as a parent. I feel I am better at parenting now that I’ve had to parent Penny. Aside from the couple of big dust ups we had, I can say that she has put us through our paces with normal teenage things, and I haven’t handled every challenge the way I should have, but it gave me a lot of insight into what I need to consider and change and do differently next time. One of the things Mike and I need to seriously consider is the idea of making expectations clear, following through when things don’t get done, and the resulting consequences. I don’t think Penny is a child who has had a lot of negative consequences in her life. We had a discussion not too long ago in which she said she likes my parenting style with Leah. If Leah falls off the jungle gym at the playground, she knows not to do it again. But Penny says that parents she knows in Thailand would likely blame the playground and never bring their child back. Still, there has been a part of me reluctant to discipline someone else’s 18 year old.

I have learned to be a better communicator, I’ve learned to be tough and say the tough things that need to be said, I’ve learned to try different ways of getting my point across, expressing opinions and being much more verbal than I have ever been in my life. Mike and I were talking today about hosting in the future from a country like Australia, and while we are not opposed to it, I very much like the challenge of attempting to communicate with someone who does not speak English well. There are of course frustrations, and toss on top of those frustrations the ones that come with a husband who can’t hear you half the time and has trouble always understanding a thick accent, and you’re in for some laughs!

Penny has gotten a couple of new experiences in this month. She got to do some volunteer hours, finally, in support a 5K to support the local food bank. It was tough on her—she had to be there at 5AM on a Saturday, and I left her there to figure things out for herself, but she eventually did it, did a great job volunteering, and made a new friend along the way.

Penny also got to experience the death of a pet as our rabbit, TomTom, had to be put to sleep. It was a very difficult experience for my husband and I, as we got TomTom as a baby bunny when we thought there might never be children in our home and so we basically coddled that rabbit and spoiled him rotten. In the end, he was in pretty rough shape and letting him go was the kind thing to do, but it was definitely hard and Penny shed a few tears over him, even though she does not like pets and animals much at all. I remember the first night she was here, as we were giving her a tour of the house, she went right over to the cage and said, “Hello, TomTom!” quite loudly, and it was the most she said for a week, and a sweet memory to this day.

This past weekend, we farmed Penny out for the long weekend. Saturday she went up to my friend Melissa’s. Melissa is an avid hiker and decided that Penny needed to hike up in the Shenandoah Mountains at least once before she goes back home. So Saturday, they headed out on a 1.4 mile hike to a waterfall, and for ice cream. She reported afterwards that she really enjoyed hiking and she LOVES blackberry ice cream. Maybe she’ll pick up a new hobby now!

Afterwards, Melissa dropped Penny off with my sister, Judy, and her family for Sunday. Judy took her to the local farmer’s market, which Penny liked a lot, although she felt it was expensive. My sister reported, “I know why you’ve had such a rough year!” when I picked Penny up today, as Penny reportedly refused to indicate an interest in anything or to participate in anything that a) cost money or b) involved being outside. Finally my sister splurged on movie tickets and they went to see Kung Fu Panda in 3D, and Penny loved it and maybe even cried at the end?

We picked Penny up today and had a little Memorial Day indoor picnic. (We are in the midst of a massive heat wave here in Virginia, so going outside even if Penny was willing was not going to happen!) I was happy that when I went to Giant, they had a cake decorated similarly to how the Labor Day cookie I’d bought last September was decorated, it’s kind of a nice bookend to Penny’s first and last American holidays.

I think it was a good weekend for all of us. We got to get in a little practice at being a family of 3 again and seeing how that dynamic would work when things go back to being that way in a few weeks. I was very surprised—Leah really didn’t ask for Penny much at all, and Mike and I handled the division of labor quite nicely. We did miss Penny, and it brought into stark focus how quiet the house is going to be without her yelling and stomping around (she is a VERY heavy walker). And I think it was good for her. At my sister’s, she was sleeping on a broken futon, no cable TV, no internet, so the simple things she enjoys here were very much brought into focus for her and gave her a greater appreciation for what good things she has. We were reminded too of the good things she brings to our family, so it was a win-win. I will miss her, no denying it!

Next weekend she will head to Charlottesville on Saturday, and come back Sunday. The host family she stayed with during AFS orientation wanted to have her back, so she’s off to stay with them. The following weekend we will have an AFS picnic for our area and then on Sunday is Father’s Day and we will do a 5K. The following weekend she graduates! And then we’re off to the races. It may be that Penny is done with school on June 8th, so I am busily planning some last minute fun. She has requested one more mall trip (ugh! but I’ll do it for her. She explained the clothes in Thai malls rarely fit her and she just enjoys going and trying on clothes—should be fun trying to keep Leah corralled!), and I want to take both girls up to the Baltimore Aquarium. Penny is interested in King’s Dominion, we are thinking about Luray Caverns, and of course, our trip to NYC. Oh yeah, and she has to pack, will want to hang out with her friends, and we’re having a good-bye party for her!!! So I know this time is going to fly by, and I’m just going to savor every minute of it while I can.

(The January page of the scrapbook, commemorating our trip to the Adirondacks, where we were snowed in for a week!)

Celebrities and Proms

2011-05-14T18:46:00.001-07:00

Penny is off at her prom this evening. We are so happy that she chose to go and work towards one of our goals for her, which is to attend 3 activities at her school. She is out with her friend, Lesley, who is her “date”.

The last several weeks, since before we left for Rhode Island, have been spent obsessing about hair. She asked me to take her to Wal-Mart to buy a straightener so she could curl her hair. I asked her why she didn’t just want to buy a curling iron, but it turns out that Penny’s mom’s chief complaint is that Penny doesn’t brush her hair, so Penny feels that rather than taking 20 seconds to brush her hair, she could straighten it and her mom would never know the difference. Anyway, we found a straightener “as seen on TV” that claimed with a flick of the wrist it would also curl, so she bought it.

We wound up having to watch an instructional DVD and we got OK results with it after practicing quite a bit. Penny came floating home from school one day with a single limp curl in her hair declaring that she had finally worked it out and didn’t her hair look great?! It was then I decided we were buying a curling iron. We practiced with it the first night, and her hair was magically curly, much to her delight. (The right tool works wonders!) So tonight, we went to town and curled her up for her big night… She was so happy with the results.

She completed it very simply with a headband we had bought for her, and I think she looked like a million dollars!

Another goal Penny had set for herself was to meet a celebrity while in the United States. I was so excited this week when a friend told me that Paul Burrell was coming to Fredericksburg. I have long been a very great admirer of the late Princess Diana and while I never got to meet her, meeting the man she called her “rock” was as good as it was going to get. I have gotten Penny quite interested in the British royal family during her stay here, so I asked her if she wanted to go and meet Paul Burrell and she said she would love to! Thus her first celebrity meeting was inked.

We went over this morning to the furniture store where the event was being held—it seems Mr. Burrell has had a hand in designing his own line of furniture based on the furniture of the royal family. He was also signing any books that you had and you could buy books once you got there. I happened to have two of his books and picked up one more while we were over there… Penny was quite shy at first and didn’t get a book signed, contenting herself to take pictures of Leah and I.

I did talk her into getting her own picture taken with him, and she was pretty happy about that!

But as we were walking back to the car, I asked her if she didn’t really want to get the last book signed for herself and she hesitated. But I could tell she wanted to, so I gave her my last book and told her we’d go back. She said she didn’t know what to talk about, so I suggested she ask him about the Royal Wedding that we just watched, which is exactly what she did. He didn’t mind signing her book at all and told her what a grand event the wedding had been and that he thought Kate looked “radiant”. And when they were done, so did Penny. She clutched that book to her very tightly, and I know she’ll treasure it for a long time to come.

It was a glorious day for me, to be sure; as I told him, it was an honor just to be in the same room, much less shake his hand and have him put an arm around me for a photo. But it was also special as a mom to see my two girls interact with him (he actually got down on the floor to interact with Leah, who was MADLY in love), and for Penny to be brave and go speak to him.

In a few hours, I’ll go retrieve her from her big night and our grand Saturday will be but a memory. But it was a great day indeed!

April, April

2011-04-30T17:28:00.001-07:00

We have had a tumultuous April here, to say the least. Things got bad very quickly right around the beginning of the month, bad enough that we threw up our hands and decided to let AFS deal with Penny and her numerous problems. After consulting with us, amongst themselves, and with the program officers in both the US and Thailand, ultimately it was decided that as a family, we could choose whether Penny would return home early or whether we would keep her.

Penny has had a great deal of difficulty assimilating into American society. The only area in which she shows the slightest bit of interest is in food. She keeps a small journal tucked in her purse, and in it she records where we eat every time we go out to eat. She takes pictures of all the food she eats. The only thing she spends money on is food. However, she is obsessed with her weight and with dieting, and so food is not something that makes her happy. In fact, it makes her quite miserable. She is currently stockpiling food that she plans to bring home with her to share with her family and friends. And therein lies the problem: Leah went in her room one night looking for goodies and when I went in to retrieve her, I found Penny’s true sentiments about our family and country written in her student calendar, which Leah had gotten into from Penny’s bag.

Penny has held onto being Thai like a suit of armor. If it looks like anyone is close to her or she is in danger of changing her way of doing things, she immediately throws up culture as a blockade against it. We had had a disagreement the weekend prior to Leah’s cookie expedition and as Penny was screaming at us, she screamed that we don’t want her to be Thai any more and that we hate Thai culture and that she is sick of being told to adjust and she won’t do it any more. The fact is, she has not done it at all.

So recently, we made a suggestion to Penny which she liked, and immediately she followed the old adage that if you give an inch, they take a mile, and she attempted to take us on a 5 mile hike. We pulled in the reins and told her she would not be running the show and skipping school to do things that ultimately have no value to her program, and she reacted by writing nasty messages in English in her date book, shredding the Valentine cards we had made her, and destroying family photographs.

After we contacted AFS, they contacted Penny’s school counselor to see if perhaps we had a family issue that was brewing and that Penny was actually fine. Unfortunately, the school counselor confirmed that no one at the high school even knows Penny exists.

So ultimately, we had to ask Penny what she really wanted here. We were of the opinion that she wanted to go home, as she’s been saying she wants to go home nearly since the day she got here. She swore up and down that she did not want to, that she wanted to stay here and finish out her year. When I asked her why, given the amount of anger she had clearly inside for us and for the US, she stated that she wanted to finish to make her family proud. That wasn’t good enough for me, so she later wrote us a letter and stated that she has had a wonderful experience and is extremely grateful and wants to do better and leave a good impression on everyone.

Mike and I talked it over and ultimately decided that in this case, words were meaningless and we’d have to see some action to know Penny was serious. Long story short, we drew up a behavior contract that Penny would have to sign that included things that she had to do like “Penny must plan an activity night for her friends” and “Penny must participate in volunteer work in the community” and “Penny must participate in activities at school” and things that she can no longer do, like swearing. There are “punishment” type things too, like she has to help with yard work, a task that is hard for her as it involves being out in the sun, which she is terrified of because she does not want to get tan (seeing her mow the lawn yesterday in a scarf, gloves, hat, long pants, and long sleeves was quite a sight!) Most of these things that will force her to make her mark on our town and on her school before she leaves. AFS approved of the plan and Penny read it over and has agreed to it. So far, she has jumped in with both feet, planning a Thai dinner that was attended by 5 of her friends, and deciding to go to the prom, for which she is shopping today with our friend Emily.

We were extremely grateful that AFS spent so much time with us as a family. Mike and I felt like failures at the parenting game—we really have been trying to solve many of our problems on our own. Ultimately that’s what a liaison is for, and I’m pleased our liaison, while she was out of town on AFS business unfortunately, kept in touch with us the entire time. And we made the decision to keep Penny based on the fact that we feel she will learn bigger lessons about forgiveness and about America this way than by sending her home with a bad taste in her mouth, despite that bad taste being a result of her own behavior. She asked me later why I was letting her stay and I said, “Penny, this would be much easier if I didn’t love you, but I’ve spent 8 months taking care of you and I can’t just turn that off.” This made her cry, and I think helped her realize just how close she came to throwing everything away. But just like when we adopted Leah, we took her for better or for worse, and that really helped us to see Penny as our kid, not just someone we can toss out. So that pretty much sums it up.

Consequently, while some of our other plans for Penny are up in the air, we decided to go ahead with our planned vacation to New England for Easter. Penny had spring break this past week and we haven’t been up to see Mike’s parents in nearly 2 years, and he was really excited to get home. We felt that we would be punishing ourselves by foregoing the trip and so we decided to go for it. We drove up to Rhode Island on Friday and stayed until Thursday (I had to get home in time to watch the Royal Wedding!). It was a long car ride, although frankly we made the best time we’ve ever done going to RI and it was the best trip we’d had traffic-wise in forever. Even making 4 stops for gas, food, and potty breaks, we made it in under 10 hours. Penny kept us entertained by singing in the backseat with her earphones in.

Easter itself was a lovely affair with the family. Mike’s sisters and parents provided Penny with some nice gifts, including some candy bunny teeth! She helped Leah and my nephew find eggs, tried lots of good food, and was thrilled to discover the piano in the basement, so put on a small recital for everyone. We were all quite happy and relaxed. After everyone had left, we took her on a short driving tour of Fall River, MA, the next town over. We showed her the Lizzie Borden museum and B&B, and took her over to the restaurant where we were married. She liked seeing it and we enjoyed being back, as on April 20, we celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary. She also got to see Mike’s high school, the Four Corners area, and such.

Monday morning, Mike was being interviewed for a newspaper article and afterwards, I packed Penny into the car and we headed to Newport for the rest of the day. Our first destination was Ocean Drive (which my in-laws call Twelve Mile Drive—not being a local, I’m not sure which is correct), and I stopped to show Penny one of my favorite views of the ocean from Newport. We collected some seashells and sea glass, and she took a few pictures while scrambling around on the rocks.

We continued out to Brenton Point for more of the same—it was quite cloudy and the water was very choppy, so there was lots of spray and it was all what I love about life in New England.

After we’d had enough of that (or as much as I felt compelled to put one teenager through!), we headed over to Washington Square/Thames Street. I showed Penny the Tennis Hall of Fame, where Mike and I met for the first time (lest you think we’re tennis enthusiasts, we’re not, we simply chose an easy landmark for our first meeting!). Then we parked over by Yesterday’s restaurant, one of my favorite places to eat in Newport and walked down Thames Street and back around to the Newport Visitor’s Center to get some brochures about the famous mansions. Newport has a new cupcake shop, so we decided to get some cupcakes for an afternoon snack and then check out souvenir shops and other little spots in the Brick Market Place.

Then we headed back to Yesterday’s for lunch!

I had a wonderful time with my old favorite sandwich, The Big Al, and Penny enjoyed a salmon sandwich while we looked over brochures and she agonized about which mansion to go into. They have a package where you can go visit The Breakers, the largest and most famous of the mansions, and then choose one other mansion besides. But there were two others she wanted to see, and it was already 1:30 and the mansions close at 5:00. So she had to decide between Marble House and The Elms. She leaned towards Marble House, but she had some time to decide, as we decided to go to The Breakers first.

(The backside of The Breakers, Penny is on the stairs towards the right)

The Breakers was owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt II and family, and was built between 1893-1895. Even then it cost $12 million to construct, and was used only as the Vanderbilt family’s summer home. Eventually it became too expensive to run as a private home and was sold to the Newport Historical Society, which now runs it as a museum. I had visited the home many years ago when my sister attended nearby Salve Regina University, but hadn’t been back, despite now having in laws a mere 20 miles away from the place, so I was excited to do some sightseeing myself. The society now offers audio tours instead of guided tours, and I enjoyed it, although since Penny is not much for museums, I skipped much of the audio just to keep her from getting bored. She was truly awestruck by the grandeur of the place, though, and I think she got a lot out of seeing how the other half lived. You’re not supposed to take pictures inside the mansions, but oh well, we needed at least one.

After we finished the tour of the Breakers, we drove past Marble House and The Elms so that Penny could decide which one she wanted to see. I had never been to The Elms and had been to Marble House, which she wanted to factor in on her decision making, but as I told her, I will be in Rhode Island plenty and she should choose the one she really wanted to see. She ultimately chose Marble House.

Marble House was built by Cornelius Vanderbuilt II’s brother, William, and his wife, Alva, from 188-1892. Alva wanted a home inspired by Versailles and demanded to have full artistic control over the home, which was a birthday gift from her husband. The house was also considered a summer “cottage”, just like The Breakers. The Vanderbilts divorced just several years after the home was completed, and Alva moved, but kept ownership of the home, which she used as a glorified closet until the death of her second husband. She added a Chinese tea house on the back lawn with a beautiful view of the ocean. Eventually the Preservation society also acquired this home and placed it on the tour with the other mansions it now owns. They also do a lovely audio tour, which from start to finish lasts only 35 minutes, while we are at The Breakers for nearly 2 hours. No pictures allowed, but we did manage to grab a couple anyway.

Penny also loved Marble House, which for my money is quite gaudy (which is saying something, considering the walls of one room of The Breakers are painted with solid platinum!). But I just enjoyed the tour and since the main tour was so short, I took the time to listen to some of the bonus information.

By now it was about 4:00, so if we wanted to, we could have upgraded our ticket and squeezed in The Elms, but ultimately decided not to. We chose instead to hit the Cliff Walk and St. Mary’s church, which is where President and Mrs. Kennedy were married in 1953. Unfortunately, the church was closed to visitors by the time we’d arrived, so we didn’t get to go inside, and instead made our way to the Cliff Walk.

The Cliff Walk is a 3.5 mile trek that runs from Easton’s Beach to the end of Bellevue Avenue and passes many of the famous mansions. We hopped on near Salve Regina and walked as far as the Breakers, approximately a half-mile hike. Penny is afraid of heights, and there is a good drop if you get too close to the edge, although there are good fences up much of the way. Still, Penny kept close to the wall, which in many ways is, to me, a metaphor for her year in the US.

We did our full loop for a mile and then drove over to Easton’s Beach and ate our cupcakes before returning to my in-laws' for the night. I needed to rest up because Tuesday was our great Boston adventure.

Penny, as I have mentioned, is determined to get into Harvard. Whether or not I or anyone else thinks this is a reality, it is her big dream. When I asked her what she wanted to see in Boston, her top answer was Harvard. So Tuesday morning, we left at 9AM and drove over the Cambridge and walked Harvard. She fell in love hard and fast, and I will say, at least it gives her something to strive for and something about coming back to the US that might feel good.

We strolled Harvard for a good hour in search of the law school campus, but alas, I did not see it. We did see a nice statue of John Harvard, found some campus museums, went in a place you weren’t even allowed to take pictures of the hallways (something serious must go on there!), and just absorbed the atmosphere. We also went to the Harvard Book Store. Penny is determined not to spend money on souvenirs, so we now take pictures of her holding up T-shirts to places she’s been. (I have opinions about this, but I keep reminding myself, “this is not MY exchange year!”) At the bookstore, we found a Harvard shirt.

After we got done there, Mike and I decided on a program that would show her some of Boston from air and land. So I drove us over to the Prudential Tower to leave the car and took Penny up to the SkyWalk on the 50th Floor of the tower. She was terrified! But I told her I hadn’t spent $13 for her not to look out the windows, so I held her hand (which she nearly twisted off) and pointed out interesting sights on all 4 sides of the Pru.

They had a nice movie playing up there about Boston and its sights and we watched that in an enclosed theater, which helped her calm down a bit. When we got back down to terra firma, I told her not to let fear rule her life and that facing her fears would help her be a stronger person and that I was proud of her for staying up there for so long. She didn’t care for my eloquent advice-giving, she just wanted out! :-D

So we walked down Boylston Street and Penny told me that Boston was exactly what she thought all of America would look like. She asked me if NYC was like Boston, and I told her no, it was a totally different city. It is difficult to explain the differences to someone who’s never been to both, but if you have, you’ll know what I mean.

We got on the T and after I got us lost (I never did understand the T system very well and always got lost!), we took the train down to Government Center to go to Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market for lunch. We feasted on lobster roll and lobster pie and then poked around the shops and the Hard Rock Cafe before going over to the National Park Service’s visitor’s center. Since Penny isn’t much on museums, as I mentioned, we decided to scrap our plans to walk the Freedom Trail. I wanted to go see the apartments Mike and I used to live in when we were first together and then married, so we did that real quick and then I suggested to Penny that since we had time, we could shoot on down to Plymouth to see the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. She agreed. She asked me if I was tired, and I said yes, was she? And she said no, but then promptly slept for the entire time it took us to get from Boston to Plymouth. We arrived at 4:45, with only 15 minutes to explore the Mayflower II. I paid for it anyway, as I had never been on it myself, and we sped on through the exhibit and hit the boat in time for Penny to be accosted by one of the period actors who made her help take down some of the flags from the masts.

The ship itself was quite interesting and I’m sure it would be awesome to actually go when there was time to talk to everyone and learn about the ship itself and the journey across the Atlantic. But alas, that was not the day. We disembarked and checked out a nearby souvenir stand for bottles of water and then Plymouth Rock, which as you might imagine is indeed just a rock inside a shelter. I’ve been to see it many times and always find it funny to see people standing around watching it, as if something might happen if we just wait long enough.

On the way through the town of Plymouth, I had seen signs for the National Monument to the Forefathers, so I decided we’d go see that as well, since we were there and I’d never seen it. It’s basically a big statue in a huge field in the middle of a residential neighborhood, and I somehow missed it and Penny thankfully yelled, “It’s right there!” as I drove past.

The monument is quite an amazing and inspiring work. There are four smaller statues around the base of the larger statue in on both sides of either of them are smaller reliefs carved into the stone. It’s worth a stop if you ever find yourself in Plymouth!

Afterwards, it was time for dinner, and we agreed that we hadn’t eaten enough lobster yet, so we found a place to get lobster roll and lobster pasta and enjoyed the heck out of our dinners before getting back to the house around 9pm.

Wednesday we didn’t have much planned, but I knew Penny didn’t especially want to sit around the house, and a place I find absolutely fascinating is nearby to the house: The Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast. They have a tour of the place every hour on the hour and you can get a complete history of the case and a look at the crime scene. It’s reportedly one of the most haunted houses in America, and when Mike took me there some 10 years ago when we were dating, I can say I smelled something awful in the bedroom where Mrs. Borden was killed. So while I know Penny is scared of ghosts, I decided to take her anyway to see if I had a similar experience, and I think it’s good for her to try all different kinds of things. And I feel as if this might be one of those “only in America” type things that should be experienced!

We made it over in time for the 2:00 tour and Will, the tour guide, was a true aficionado of the case and fascinating to talk to (even if we widely differ in our opinions about who committed the murder! But I did learn a lot from him!).

Penny outside the Bordens’ front door

Penny sitting on a couch at the approximate location where Mr. Borden’s head was

After the tour, we headed over to see where Lizzie lived after she was acquitted of the case and then to the cemetery to see her grave. Penny flatly refused to get out of the car, saying cemeteries made her very depressed and she very nearly started crying, so we left as soon as I snapped a couple of pictures of the graves.

And no, for the record, I did not leave the flower there.

Afterwards, we headed to the grocery store and Penny picked up supplies to cook everyone a Thai dinner as a thank you after she had been generously hosted by Mike’s family. She decided to make spicy noodles with shrimp and chicken with ginger, which was eagerly consumed by our hungry family! My sister-in-law and nephew also came over, and Penny got pictures with everyone, as I doubt she will see any of Mike’s family again before she leaves to go home.

We left bright and early at 6:15 the next morning. Penny slept all the way from Massachusetts to New Jersey, where we stopped for lunch, and then again to Maryland, a good indication that we had done a great job of exhausting her. She was happy to get home, and that evening I taught her to bake scones for the following morning. She overslept a bit for the opening part of the Royal Wedding, but managed to rouse herself in time for the ceremony. We shared scones and clotted cream and fruit for breakfast and she was blown away by the spectacle of a Western royal wedding. It was nice to talk with her about the royal family of Thailand and how there haven’t been any recent royal weddings. She is so respectful of her king and the royal family and actually taught me quite a lot about them as a matter of contrast between her country and England. It was a nice cultural exchange.

So that’s where things stand in our home for now. I do have Penny’s every weekend planned out until she goes home, as I am of the opinion that if she keeps busy, she will keep out of trouble. I am blessed that I have wonderful friends who are taking an interest in her and will help keep her occupied and our AFS area president said other families have volunteered if we fall short of things for her to do. The only thing up in the air is if I will take her to New York City or not. I refuse to make any decisions on that matter until I see how May goes. I know it is her dream of being in the US to travel there, and she will have to demonstrate a full commitment to being the best exchange student possible before I fully commit to the trip. I hope she will!

We remind her regularly that she has much to be grateful for, and she is now keeping a gratitude journal on the kitchen wall calendar where we can see it. She knows that she could be sitting in Thailand right now, wondering “What if?” and we know we could have been without her too. Like Voltaire said, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” and we are determined to live that way for the next two months and beyond as we cultivate a relationship with this young lady.

It’s Starting to Happen…

2011-04-03T19:56:00.001-07:00

This past weekend we’ve done a lot of talking, Mike and I, about the upcoming months, and for the first time in almost a year, we’ve begun to make plans for a family of 3 instead of a family of 4. We have been talking about a beach trip, upcoming holidays, birthdays, and more, and all with the sudden realization that Penny will not be here.

It is both sad and a little bit freeing. Take for instance our planning a trip to the beach. We typically go every spring and love it. Leah can spend hours digging in the sand, and Mike and I can spend hours sitting or walking along the beach, watching the waves, listening to the seagulls, and enjoying ourselves doing absolutely nothing.

Penny, on the other hand, hates the sun. She informed us that she absolutely will not set foot on the beach until at least 5pm. Lest you think she is prejudiced, she also hates cloudy days, which she says make her depressed. If it’s warm and sunny outside, she’s too hot. If it’s cloudy outside, she’s immediately cold. She hates the air conditioning. She has spent most of her time here wearing shorts (including all winter) and then complaining that we don’t keep the house warm enough.

So we knew that going to the beach as a family of four was, well, stupid. Instead we will go in September, when the weather is still really nice and warm, and we can spend our days out on the beach without worrying about a sulky teenager sitting alone in the condo!

But in many ways, it is also quite sad. She came home from the mall yesterday and asked how it felt to have a quiet house with no children (Leah was away for the weekend). And I answered honestly that for the first time, it’s really hit home that she’s actually leaving. We talked a lot about what her leaving would feel like to all of us, about what her year has meant to us all. I told her that there have been times she’s made me so angry I absolutely wanted to throttle her, and there are other times I can envision myself chasing the bus down the road and trying to never let her go. We’ve talked about opportunities and time she wasted, what she could/would/should have done differently, what she did exactly right, what she still has time to change, what things she should still take advantage of. She is presently debating going to the prom. She’s never going to have the opportunity again, so I told her to take the bull by the horns and go. I hope she will. She has asked a friend to go with her, and I think they could have a very good time.

She admitted today that she is very excited about going to graduation and going through the ceremony. Ok, ok, she also said she was just glad to be done with American high school, which in my view indicates a pretty poor attitude in general, but be that as it may, her excitement about the prospect of doing ANYTHING is a good sign.

Today we went back to the Riverside Theater and saw another show and she asked to see another one before she leaves, so we’ve scheduled one last theater jaunt for 3 days before her scheduled departure. She made plans with a friend of mine to go see the Shenandoah Mountains—something she expressed no interest in when I mentioned it to her before. We’ve got our trip to NYC narrowed down to 2 possible dates, so I can begin to plan that out. She is busy attending an SAT class in the hopes that she can score well on it, better than she thinks she did on the TOEFL, to keep her dreams of attending an American college alive.

Every week she combs the grocery store, looking for snacks on sale to bring home with her. We are all starting to consider how she will pack the things that she wants to take home, what she will have to ship, what she will keep, what she will leave behind. So far she has agreed to part with the box her Nintendo DSi came in. She is also intrigued by the possibility of Space Bags for getting clothing and a blanket and towel she’s acquired to take up less room.

There is a definite sense of urgency she is experiencing to cram things in.

We have also started reminiscing about her first days here, how little she spoke, how far she has come, how far she still has to go in terms of learning, speaking, listening, reading, and writing English. In particular we laughed about her first days when every morning she would come downstairs and tell me that she couldn’t sleep because the air conditioner was so cold. And I would explain to her every morning, very patiently, “There is a heavy blanket under your bed.” and she would smile and say “Thank you” and the next morning, the scene would repeat itself. Finally after 3 days of this, it dawned on me, “This girl doesn’t know what the heck ‘there’s a blanket under your bed’ even means.” and I went upstairs, pulled out the underbed storage box with the heavy blanket in it out and showed it to her. She has been sleeping under it ever since.

Reminding her of this story made her laugh so hard. I recently submitted an article to Yahoo Contributors about her exchange and about how excited she was to use the dishwasher when we told her she had to do the dishes. Now it’s like an act of Congress most days to get her to do the dishes! She laughed about how on the first night, we got home and I kicked off my shoes as soon as we got in the door and so she thought she should do it too and then misinterpreted my “You don’t have to take your shoes off” as “put your shoes back on!” and she had no idea what to do.

We have grown so much as a family, as individuals. It has at times been painful, joyous, exciting, disappointing, frightening, and even worrying, but I know that when these next couple of months are over and done and Penny is home, we will still be a family of four. I assured her of such last night, telling her, “This isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning.” I truly hope it is.

Success!

2011-03-31T19:46:00.001-07:00

I was somewhat disappointed when Penny got here and promptly informed me that she hates reading, as reading is a great passion of mine. I was determined to make the kid read something, and it has taken me 7+ months, but I found a book she wanted to read…

Yes, people, we are reading The Hunger Games. WOO HOO!

On The Road Again!

2011-03-31T06:45:00.001-07:00

This past weekend the stars aligned and we decided we’d be able to take a quick trip down to Savannah, Georgia to visit some friends. Mike and I had doctor’s appointments Friday morning, so we decided to make a long weekend of it. We picked Penny up at school and headed south!

The ride down was fairly torturous. Due to an accident involving the door hinge and antenna wire, our satellite radio was out of commission. Everyone was sleeping, which was making me quite tired. We didn’t even make it out of Virginia before we stopped for lunch. By South Carolina, I had to pull over at the Welcome Center and take a 15 minute nap. We finally hit Savannah after 10 hours, something of a negative record for me, as I can usually make it in 8, or at least I could pre-toddler! When we arrived, our friends Russell and Amy had run to the grocery store, so we had dinner at McDonald’s and when they got back, we headed over to their house.

Our plan for Saturday was to go to a local restaurant and then head to Tybee Island. When I was (much) younger, my parents took my sister and I to Savannah on our way to Florida. We stopped at the Juliette Low house, since we were heavily involved in Girl Scouts, and then my parents found a restaurant called The Pirate House. I have been several times, but my dreams of Savannah have always included bringing my child(ren) to the Pirate House. My friend had a negative experience there back in the day, so he was hesitant, but I talked him into it and so it was our first stop. Given Penny’s love of Pirates of the Caribbean, I had a sneaking suspicion that it was going to be a hit with her, and I was correct. When the people at the desk gave Leah a pirate hat, Penny nearly died without one till I asked them for another. Penny posed with pirates, pirate statues, took pictures of the menu and food, kept wandering around the restaurant just to look at things, she was a little kid again. For my part, I was just trying not to cry—it brought back a lot of memories, all of them good—and was just a special day for me.

Afterwards, we headed back to Russell and Amy’s place so Leah could have her nap. The next part of our plan was that the girls would head over to Tybee Island while the men stayed home and did whatever it is men do (anyone who tells me that men aren’t prone to sitting around gabbing like, well, a couple of old women are full of it). I had shown Penny some websites of Tybee Island and she promptly declared that we were going to climb the lighthouse. So that was our first stop.

And then we got there, and she had a look at it. And it was much taller than she anticipated. And she suddenly changed her mind. But I had kind of talked myself into doing it. I’d been practicing stairs and really had worked myself up, so I told her, “Forget it, we’re going!” We left Leah with Amy and headed over. Did Penny ever heave a sigh of relief to discover that we were exactly 5 minutes late to buy the last tickets of the day! I was SO disappointed, but since Penny is afraid of heights, she was happy not to be going up there. We returned to the car, told Amy not to pay for parking, took a few pictures on the ground and decided to head for the beach. (PS, did I ever mention what a beautiful country we live in!? I love the East Coast!)

Amy directed us to the Tybee Island pier, and we found a good parking spot there. As we walked down to the beach, a couple of guys, not realizing her mother was behind her, tried hitting on Penny, but she kept her cool, said hello, and walked on by. I put the stink-eye on them immediately.

It was kind of a sketchy day to be on the beach. It was sprinkling rain on and off, and while it was warmish, it wasn’t close to hot. But it was the beach, and for my money, that’s all I gave a darn about!

Leah found a pail and shovel that someone else had obligingly left behind and was promptly busy digging in the sand. I wanted to say I was in the ocean, so I walked in up to my ankles, but darn the Atlantic is cold this time of year! Penny decided it was time to take some jumping pictures, so I turned on the sports setting and she started jumping around like a kangaroo till we got just the right picture.

To me, this photo is the absolute essence of our girl—her joy for life and exuberance when she lets herself relax and have fun and forget about everyone and everything else except being herself and having a good time.

When the rain really kicked up, we headed up to the pier and Penny grabbed a few more photos. She is stereotypically Asian when it comes to taking pictures—if there are pictures to be taken, she will take them, and hilariously she takes pictures of herself constantly. She doesn’t understand why I don’t want more pictures of myself, but I hate pictures! I submit to them for her sake. :)

After walking to the end of the pier and back, the rain was really kicking in, and Penny hates rain as much as she hates the sun, so it was time to roll on back to the car. Our dinner plans were to go to the Crab Shack, “Where the Elite Eat in their Bare Feet”. I’ve been wanting to go there since I saw it on a Food Network show and Amy knew right where it was, so we headed over there and found a big line. They offered anyone who was willing to chance it immediate seating in the outdoor area, so we decided to chance it. We got a great table, right in front of the water and under a big tree.

It was a bit cold, so I ordered myself soup and then Penny and I both decided to try the shrimp salad, which was DIVINE. I have been looking for a good shrimp salad for a zillion years and it was the best I’d ever had, hands down. Leah got a “dog dog” and Amy got a low country boil. It was amazing. They had an alligator pit nearby with little gators, so we had a look at those, and a webcam, so we called the guys and they looked at us waving to them on line, which was fun, too.

On the way home, we stopped by WalMart to grab a few items, and on our way out, Amy told us that Paula Deen’s husband was parked nearby. It was the closest we’d gotten to celebrity in Penny’s stay, so we took a picture of the car and hilariously pondered gently rear-ending him, although we ultimately decided my insurance company didn’t need more money.

(He’s in the car with the bright tail lights)

We headed home and broke out a game of SkipBo, which we taught Russell, while Amy made us all cupcakes—chocolate with peanut butter icing. YUM!!!!! There was a Back to the Future marathon on TV and it was a nice and relaxing evening.

Until about 11:30, when Leah woke up and all heck broke loose… Penny tried to convince her to sleep with her on the couch. No dice. We tried putting her in her crib and ignoring her. Nope. Finally, I wound up taking her for a drive all over Savannah till 1AM, hoping it would put her out, but nope, nothing. At 1:15AM, I rolled back to the house, poked Mike, told him to deal with it, and curled up in a recliner. When she finally went to sleep, I climbed back into bed and passed out till 9:00. Which put us behind schedule for going and hopping on a trolley tour.

Poor Amy! I told her we’d be up and ready by 8:00 to head back to town for the tour, and she slept through Leah’s episode, so she was up and dressed, and we all slept in! We finally roused ourselves and were ready to roll by 11:00. We had planned to go to Love’s Seafood for lunch, so we didn’t want a lot to eat, but we were all hungry nonetheless, so we girls stopped off at Sonic (the men decided to stay behind at the house instead of going on the trolley) and grabbed sandwiches and headed to town.

We took the Old Town Trolley Tour of Savannah. Penny is not much on history, and the guy was a little bit difficult to understand anyway, so I think she mainly tuned out, enjoying the ride in the sun and fresh air, and taking pictures and just looking around. Towards the end she actually got out her iPod and put that on, but there were only about 30 seconds of the tour left, so I didn’t have to kill her.

Afterwards, Leah had pretty much exhausted herself by running up and down the aisles of the trolley screaming and waving to passersby (thankfully the tour wasn’t too busy, because I was just way too tired to deal with her and everyone was extremely nice about it). We headed back to Russell and Amy’s and broke out a deck of cards for some fierce Skip Bo competition while Leah took a nap. A severe storm system moved into the area with huge thunderstorms and high winds, tornado warnings, hail, the works. When it finally calmed down, we decided to head over to dinner at Love’s, and of course, disaster struck.

As we were driving, I went through a puddle and the car decided to give up on accelerating and we had to pull over. I turned it on and off twice until it was willing to at least go, but the check engine light came on, and anyone who knows anything about me knows that the car is the second thing I am most neurotic about (going to the dentist is the first). So I started panicking. Russell and Amy hadn’t noticed we weren’t behind them any more, so they were long gone, but fortunately it was a straight line and we found them pretty quickly. The dinner talk was dominated by car talk and my panic. But it was still a lovely restaurant—apparently some of Forrest Gump was filmed there—and Leah made friends with all the other patrons who had braved the rainy night to come out.

When we got back, I called my dad and had a good cry and then somehow the topic of Steel Magnolias came up and soon Amy and I were practically weeping over what an awesome movie it was. So since Amy had the DVD, we decided to get it out and show it to Penny, and I was crying in the first 30 minutes. By the end, Amy and I were both teary messes and Penny was gamely trying not to cry. It was pretty great. Hilariously, Amy’s DVD had Thai subtitles, so we put them on for Penny, but she said they were very confusing and not very good. But now we all know what “eat shit and die” looks like in Thai!

The next morning, we were up and out by 9:00. My dad convinced me I’d be fine to drive the car back home, and so we set out, even though the check engine light was still on. My goal was to hit South of the Border in time for lunch, and we made it by 12:30. Hooray! South of the Border is one of those things all tourists on the roads of the East Coast MUST see. Penny was not leaving the United States without a trip there. I’m sad that it’s become so rundown—I was actually a little bit frightened when I used the bathroom as there were some shady looking characters hanging out in there. But we enjoyed our lunch, and I got Penny a pressed penny souvenir and we got some fun pictures of Penny and Leah with Pedro.

Then it was officially time to go home. And don’t you think I was the only one who stayed awake!? Everyone was out cold before we hit the highway, which made it easier to roll without having to stop for potty breaks and the like.

We made it to just south of Richmond before we stopped for a quick potty break and gas, and then we were home!!!!

It was a wonderful trip, a beautiful part of the country to show Penny, and she has now been to every single state on the east coast from New York south. In April with our New England trip, she’ll make it to the rest except for Maine and New Hampshire, and I’m pondering hitting those so she can say she went to all the states on the East Coast except for Vermont. We’ll have to see what we have time for! Because time is the one thing we are running out of!!!! Yikes!!!

Some Unusual Firsts?

2011-03-17T10:43:00.001-07:00

This has been baby week! Two of my friends gave birth this week, one had a girl and one had a boy. My friend Lisa gave birth to little Frederick yesterday afternoon, and invited us to come by the hospital last night, since she knew Penny was sick with excitement over the prospect of holding a newborn. In fact, when we arrived at the hospital, Fred was just 6 hours hold. Penny could barely stand up, she was literally shaking with excitement.

But she was also excited for another reason: she had never been inside an American hospital before! She took pictures of the place, and was just amazed at how nice the facility was—she said it looked like a hotel inside. We were at Spotsylvania Medical Center, which I think just opened a year ago, and I must admit, it is a beautiful facility.

When we finally got to hold Fred, I handed him to Penny and she had tears in her eyes. It was a very moving moment for her, and I think that she was profoundly impressed by the “circle of life”, if I can be cliché for a moment. And I have to say, it was an amazing moment for me too!

Secondly, yesterday we stopped at the mailbox for a moment so I could put in a postcard to mail. Penny asked what I was doing, and I said that I was leaving a letter for the mailman. She asked if he was going to pick it up and mail it? I said yes he was, and she told me that this is never the case in Thailand. You always have to mail your letters at the post office. I showed her the flag on the side of the box and explained how if it’s up, that means the mailman knows he has to stop and pick up your outgoing mail whether or not he has mail for you or not. As we drove down our street afterwards, it turned out a bunch of our neighbors were mailing letters and she exclaimed “Ooooh!” each time she saw a red flag in the air.

Just another example of something we take for granted that is unusual seen through foreign eyes!

What’s Next For This Host Family?

2011-03-16T04:50:00.001-07:00

The new applications for next year’s students are starting to flow in, and the current students are starting to look towards the end of their exchange. As a family, we can now see that the time is growing short until we bid Penny “adieu” and look towards the future.

We will definitely not be hosting next year, as I have mentioned. AFS does not recommend hosting two years in a row, and we definitely feel the need for a break. Our exchange year has been an incredible time of growth for our entire family, and all of us will finish out the year changed in many ways. It has been both easier and harder than we could ever have imagined. There have been times I’ve laughed until I cried (yesterday, watching Leah fly down the aisles of the local grocery store, Penny giving chase with a basket of Ritz crackers flying behind her, both of them perilously close to losing their sandals as they laughed and ran through the store, startled customers in their wake) and cried until I’ve laughed (listening to Penny’s constant refrain of “I want to see my friends!” while ignoring the friends she could have had for 7 months has been grating to say the least).

Next year will be a dynamic year for our family, however, as I start to pursue my next master’s degree, Leah gets ready to start the next phase of her life (preschool maybe?), and Mike continues plowing ahead at work! As for Penny, she will return home and start her third senior year of high school (she was in the midst of her senior year in Thailand when she left to come to the US, is doing a senior year here in the US, and then has to go back to Thailand and start her senior year over). She will start applying to colleges. She is taking the TOEFL this weekend and will take an SAT prep class and the SAT’s, as she hopes to come back to the US to go to college. We have kind of mixed feelings about this, given her reluctance/resistance to fully participate in most aspects of American life (read: anything outside our family), but it is her choice and her future, and we are going to let her do the deciding with the help of her family in Thailand (see? I can let go and not be in control! haha)

However, all that being said, we decided that we still want to be involved in AFS. I spoke to the head of our area team a week or two ago and given what she said and what the requirements were, we decided to become an aunt and uncle family. This would allow us to spend time with another student next year without the commitment of hosting and without any paperwork. An aunt and uncle family takes a student on occasional outings, like helping them do Christmas shopping for their host families, maybe a weekend away if the family needs a break, that kind of thing. So we figured that was great and that would be that!

Last night I got a call from Penny’s liaison, April. April interviewed us for hosting Penny and has been involved in a lot of our activities. She is a 2 time previous host mom (Sweden and Thailand), and is hosting again next year (Italy). She got straight to the point: “I need a liaison.”

Being a liaison is more of an official volunteer position. There is a training requirement, as well as requirements for monthly contact with the student and the family both, and some paperwork that has to be turned in so that the State Department knows that we are on top of things. There is the opportunity to go and take the student out for a day or an overnight, and also to intervene if there are problems between a student and their family.

So I have agreed to be a liaison next year. From speaking with one of the host moms whose placement fell through this year, I know that a good liaison can make all the difference in a great year for a family and a student. So I’m excited, and perhaps a bit apprehensive, about taking on this role, but mostly excited! I’m glad I’ll be able to continue to interact with a student this year, maybe learn a little something about Italy, and keep my toes dipped in the AFS pond while we decide if we want to host again the following school year. We’ve definitely been talking about it and thinking about which countries we’d be interested in, and we’ve also been talking about doing foster care as well, so in a year’s time, we will re-evaluate where we stand and where we want to take our family!

You can be a volunteer too! Just go to http://www.afsusa.org/ and click on “Volunteer” to sign up!

Thoughts on a Major Cultural Difference

2011-03-09T11:58:00.001-08:00

We are coming back to time to change the clocks back. Penny keeps asking us if it’s time to change the clocks yet? We keep saying not yet, but thankfully this weekend is the time. She wants to see more sunlight, which I don’t entirely understand since she flatly refuses to sit in the sun at all.

Last summer we tried taking her to swim at the community pool, but it was sunny so she sat under a tent. She didn’t join the group at her birthday party after a while because it was sunny and so she moved to sit in the only shady spot in our yard, away from all her guests. Recently, on sunny days, we watch her walking down the street with her coat held in front of her face, effectively making her blind. All in an effort to stave off the sun. She explains that in Thailand it is most desirable to have white skin. She truly believes she can lighten her skin in a variety of questionable ways. One of the most entertaining was watching a video of her and her friends on the beach in Thailand rubbing sand into their skin with a passion, convinced it would make them lighter!

I am not sure if it is Penny and her friends or all of Thailand, but there is an obsession with physical beauty and perfection that makes us uncomfortable. Penny wanders through our house with toothpaste dabbed all over her face to clear her complexion. She refuses to paint her nails, convinced that they will turn yellow and fall off (mine have now been painted for 2 weeks with no apparently ill effect, but she declines to take any kind of chances with what she terms “chemicals”).

And shockingly, Penny has endured what we would term rather stringent verbal abuse from her friends at home because she is not considered beautiful. Almost since day 1, Penny has been killing herself to get skinny—eating very little, working out like crazy—since all her friends at home comment in both English and Thai on her pictures about how fat she is. Before she came here, one of her friends informed her that her “laugh is as ugly as her face”. Another informed her that of course she has no friends in America, she is too ugly for people to like. I’ve consulted with other host families of Thai students who don’t have these issues with their kids, but Penny informs me that this is because their students are quite beautiful and she is quite ugly.

In our family, this type of thing is beyond what we have been prepared to deal with. As you all know, Penny’s host dad/my husband is totally blind. Physical appearance never enters into his consciousness. As I was a person who was picked on mercilessly as a child for my appearance, I find it very, very painful to listen to these stories and try to put them down to “Thai teenage culture” or “Asian culture”. We have tried a variety of ideas, including long discussions as a family about tolerating these types of things from our peers (particularly when Penny has a double standard about her American classmates—if they so much as look at her in a way she deems unfriendly, she sweeps home in tears for hours!), completely ignoring her behaviors, refusing to comment on anyone’s personal appearance even when Penny demands to know which Hollywood stars we think are the most beautiful, providing her with information about healthy living that is not extreme, telling her daily what a good and beautiful person she is on the inside and the outside, and refusing to comment on what she eats or what she looks like at all.

Penny is now starting to see the end point of her exchange and is excited to return home. She is not as excited about seeing her family as she is about seeing her friends. I have to admit, I struggle with this. It is very difficult to hear her go on and on about having only three months until she can see these people again who we view as “mean” to say the least. The other night we were discussing it again (Penny has been obsessed with missing her friends and seeing them again since she got here, and it caused some major issues for us in the beginning of the exchange when she would sneak behind our backs to contact them for as long and as often as possible), and I said to her, “You know, Penny, you always had an end date in mind for going back there. But you may never again see any of the people you have become close with here. And you are wasting the time you have with them on missing out on people you know you are going to see very soon.”

She did not want to hear this. We have talked about getting everything she can from her exchange year. Penny worked extremely hard to get where she is. She wanted to earn a scholarship from her mother’s job, and she wound up taking the tests and doing the interviews 3 times before winning a scholarship to come here. But quite literally every minute she has been here, she has expressed her biggest desire is to just go home and see her friends.

There are kids in her school, kids right here on our street who want to be her friend, who she freely admits have never said a bad word to her, have only been friendly and open and polite and helpful. As a host family, our number one stressor has been her refusal to work at spending time with these kids and enjoying their time together. While we don’t let her, she would far rather spend 6 or 7 hours a day on Facebook and messenger with her friends in Thailand who send negative messages her way all the time.

Penny swears that she now wants to return to the US to go to college. Her younger brother will come to the US next year to attend a private boarding school in Kentucky. We have talked about having her brother here for the holidays, and I can tell that Penny is somewhat jealous of the fact that her brother will spend time her with us (she’s told us not to buy him Christmas presents!). We find it very confusing that there are two sides to Penny—one that can’t wait to get out of the United States and another that is dying to stay.

I can only imagine how confused she must be as well.

Do You Want to Host?

2011-02-22T22:11:00.001-08:00

Although we do not plan to host next year for a variety of reasons, I highly recommend that people who are interested in hosting submit an interest form to AFS and listen to what they have to say about the hosting experience!!! If in reading my blog, you’ve felt interested in hosting in any way, please visit http://www.afsusa.org and let them know that you’d like to know more about hosting! There are students who will be desperate for a host family this spring and summer, and you could be the host parent who makes a student’s dreams into a reality!

If anyone has any questions for our family about anything we haven’t covered here on the blog, please feel free to leave a comment with your questions. Comments are hidden pending my approval, but I do get an email with the comments and then I can “publish” them. I will address any questions about hosting that I can!

The big question we get about hosting is: Would I get paid to host a student?

The answer is no. You are providing your student with a home and meals and other expenses as you would your own child. The rule our AFS liaison suggested to us was that anything we did as a family, we should plan to include Penny and budget appropriately for that. If she wants to do something on her own or with friends, she should plan to use her own money.

Penny did come with plenty of spending money, and we told her on her arrival that she’d have to use her own money to purchase her school supplies, souvenirs, and the like. We do however cover food if we all go out to eat, regular groceries (she does occasionally buy her own snacks), occasional toiletries (she likes to cover some of these on her own), and travel. For instance, when we traveled to Florida, we bought Penny’s plane ticket. She did pay for her own ticket to DisneyWorld, however, even though we did not ask her to. We do not give her money to go to the mall or movies with friends, we do not give her money to buy clothing and shoes and CD’s, and the like. She is responsible for her own finances and her family has provided her with a pot of money for the things she needs. She occasionally does not know if something is a good deal/cheap or not, so she does ask our advice on purchasing items and tries to compare the prices with what she’d pay if she were buying a similar item in Thailand. She will not purchase jeans here, as she feels they are quite expensive, in contrast to European students who feel jeans here are quite cheap!

Just before we started our exchange year, AFS sent us a letter for tax purposes, and you can claim a certain amount of money as a charitable contribution per month.

Another question we have been asked by friends is: What do you have to do as a host family?

The only thing AFS requires is that you provide the student their own bed, three square meals a day, and treat them as you would any other member of the family. As long as you are willing and able to provide the basics, you can be a host family! Your student can even share a bedroom with a sibling of the same gender, close in age.

By our nature, we tend to travel a lot. Penny has seen a pretty good portion of the country already and will be seeing a few more spots along the way. However, she has spoken to some of the kids she met in Thailand before coming to the US and their experience has been that they don’t travel at all. We simply have friends and family all over the place and choose to spend as much time as possible visiting them. Penny indicated a strong interest in travel before she arrived during the course of our pre-exchange emails and so we are more than happy to even add in an extra trip (NYC) so that she could see the country some more. There are places she’d like to see that we are just not going to get to (Las Vegas and California). But other families might decide to try and make that happen for their students!

I have been really impressed at the breadth of opportunities my fellow host families have offered their students this year—travel, theater, sports, etc. No exchanges have been even close to the same, but it has been a lot of fun to see the students busy with their exchanges and families.

Anyway, there are a couple of questions and answers. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any others!

Hairspray!

2011-02-18T07:07:00.001-08:00

Last night, as her final gift from Three Kings/Christmas, I took Penny to see Hairspray at the Riverside Dinner Theater. We went with our neighbor, Lisa, who had a friend who runs the theater, so we were able to get the table right front and center of the stage. Pretty awesome!

When we were talking about it yesterday afternoon, she said that her parents had never taken her to see live musical theater, so she was really excited.

The production is really fantastic and well worth the price of admission. Penny was ready to jump up and dance. She was hooting and hollering and cheering. It was a lot of fun for her, and she even noticed one of the girls was from her high school. During Link Larkin’s big number, he came to the front of the stage and made eye contact with Penny, singing several bars to her. It really capped off her experience, I thought she’d melt into a puddle on the floor!

Afterwards, we went over and met several of the cast members, including the girl she goes to school with, and who recognized Penny. They were all quite nice and even took a picture with her.

It was my first trip to Riverside, but it won’t be my last, I can guarantee!

Time Keeps On Ticking…

2011-02-16T20:15:00.001-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I added a countdown ticker to the blog to mark the time until we have to put Penny on a bus and wish her farewell. I was so surprised when the time on the countdown clocked became less than the clock that is counting how long she has been here. As you’ll see above, she has now been here 6 months and she only has just over 4 months to go.

Before Penny arrived, I became friendly via Facebook and our blogs with a number of other host moms. These incredible women from all around the country have been a wonderful source of support and insight into raising teenagers (having never done it myself!). We have even decided to have an AFS host moms camp at some point and meet up!

I was sad that for two of these families, their much hoped for exchange didn’t pan out in the ways they had planned and their “children” have ultimately moved on to live with other families. It is a reality of the hosting experience that ultimately, for whatever reason (and there are many!), a host match may just not be a good situation for the host family or for the exchange student or both.

I feel in some ways I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that it is possible an exchange match doesn’t work out. As I have alluded to, one of the four siblings AFS sent to live in my parents’ home wound up moving out mid-way through her year, just after Christmas, to go live with a different family in town. It was a challenging time as a family for us to live through. The student was clearly unhappy and withdrawn from family life. My parents ultimately decided that they could not tolerate behaviors from her that they would not tolerate from my sister and I, and as they were unhappy and the student was unhappy, she was relocated. It happens.

There are a lot of feelings that can lead up to a change like that. In our family, we experienced moments of hope when we all tried to make it work, moments of anger when nothing anyone did seemed to improve the situation, moments of anxiety when we didn’t know how AFS would handle the situation or what people would think of our family as we lived in a very small town and the gossip mill was (and is) in full force.

Afterwards, there was an immense feeling of relief. It was over, we could get back to our family’s normal without being sneered at, judged, or looked down upon by this girl, and a sense that if there were problems in the future, they were someone else’s to deal with. There was still some worry that when she left, she might say negative things about our family that would negatively impact how people viewed us (my father in particular was a well-respected public official), but she was, as far as I know, relatively quiet about her experiences with us and I don’t know much about what she said or did afterwards other than today she continues to live in the United States and is in touch with her second host family.

For our final exchange student with my parents at the helm, we were actually his third placement. And I would like to address this because even though a student gets bounced around from home to home, it may be that once he or she finds the right spot, it works like magic. When he first arrived in the US, he was placed with a welcome family. For anyone who doesn’t know what a welcome family is, they are a family who agrees to host a student for up to 8 weeks upon their arrival until a permanent host family can be found. So Franc wound up with a host family who had no intention of a long term hosting situation but had room in their hearts and home for a student seeking a permanent place to call home.

Once he was placed with a permanent family in Northern New York, it turned out not to be a good fit for him there. The woman who agreed to host him already had a student living with her, and for whatever reason, it just wasn’t a comfortable match for Franc. So our regional chapter of AFS decided to place Franc in the high school that my sister was attending, and as she was acting student president of the chapter at the time, she was told she’d have to host him until a permanent family in the school district could be found.

She dreaded telling my father the news in particular. He had taken the previous year’s “failed” hosting experience particularly hard and had informed everyone that we were categorically done with hosting any future students. But that night, my mother and sister had a meeting to go and left Franc and my dad alone and by the time Mom and Judy got home, my father had Franc’s year in America planned out. And it was one of those magical placements where all the pieces clicked into place and despite typical sibling fights and whatnot, to this day, we are extremely close.

So I’ve seen it work from both sides of the equation—from having a student move out to having a student in need of a home move in, and I can say that it works very positively if done correctly, which on the whole AFS seems to do pretty well.

When we had our initial interview with an AFS rep before hosting Penny, this topic came up, with regards to hosting a student and what if the experience didn’t go well and how we would handle things if it seemed like Penny would need to be moved elsewhere. There is so much hope in the matching process and in the planning and preparing for a student that you don’t like to think of anything other than the best possible outcome—that being tearful goodbyes at the end of the year, visits to your student in his/her home country, them returning to visit, weddings, births, and the like.

I can say that our exchange has not happened as we envisioned it. Are we disappointed? No way. In many ways it has been so much better than we’d ever hoped. I can say without a moment’s hesitation that Penny is a member of our family, 150%. Barring major meltdown disaster in the next 4 months, that will not change. I feel confident that if I were the exchange student, I would not do things the same way that she has gone about them, but I think that is true regardless of what you attempt in life—no two people do anything the exact same way. I have learned a lot from how she has chosen to handle things, however, and I am attempting to model good behaviors for things that I feel she needs a good role model on—things like dealing with hurt feelings, how to effectively communicate with family, goal setting, taking initiative, being adventurous and trying new things (tubing and Polish food are high on her list of new loves!), and being assertive. She has taught me to be more flexible, being accepting of people as they are, being adventurous and trying new things (seriously, I would NEVER in a million years have ridden Space Mountain or eaten Thai food were it not for Penny’s presence in my life), calling people who hurt you “friend” anyway, and not taking everything personally.

I don’t know what our new normal will look like at the end of June, but regardless, each and every exchange student whose experience I have been part of has indelibly touched my life and I know even for families whose exchange didn’t end as they expected, there were positives and negatives to the situations anyway and we have all learned and grown a lot. Here’s to a great spring!

Tubing and Valentines Day

2011-02-15T11:46:00.001-08:00

This past weekend was a weekend I wanted to keep really busy. February 13 is a day I am very superstitious about—a lot of things tend to go wrong for me on that day, not the least of which was my grandfather dying and I broke my leg! So I was excited when some friends suggested we go tubing on the 12th, and I made plans to do some volunteer work on the morning of the 13th and choir practice started up again in the evening. Plus Penny was super excited about Valentine’s Day, so I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what to do, since we don’t really do anything!

We met up with our friends Andy and Melissa at 10:30 on Saturday morning and headed out to Ski Liberty, a resort just across the Maryland border in Pennsylvania, near Gettysburg. We had a good trip with a quick stop for lunch, but unfortunately there was quite a delay once we got to the resort so we had to sit around for 3 hours and wait. We played games on various iPods and iPhones to pass the time until our lift tickets were good at 5pm.

Penny was absolutely terrified when we took her tubing at my father’s house, so I made darn sure she was going to go tubing when we got up to Liberty, but she swore she would, so she bundled up and we rented some boots for her and we headed up the mountain.

There were a TON of tubers that day (sounds like we were potatoes, doesn’t it?!) so there was a bit of a wait, and when it was finally Penny’s turn to go, she attempted to talk me into going first, but I wanted to catch video of her first run. She carefully grilled the employees about what to do, and finally sat in the tube. She demanded the “pusher” “WAIT!!!!” twice and finally just said “Bye!” to all of us and off she went. She screamed the entire way down to run. It was hilarious. She waited for me down the bottom, as I was having a few second thoughts of my own. It doesn’t appear that way, but it’s actually a VERY big hill, and a steep one, so you get going pretty fast! I felt confident when I saw Penny stop well short of the end, but when I went, I somehow got going so fast that I hit the wall at the end and bounced into the next lane and headed back up. The guys were chasing me, I was attempting to flip myself out of the tube, wound up scraping both my knees and jamming the right one, but there was someone coming down as I was going up, so it was critical I get out of there!

Penny agreed to go again, this time because she wanted to videotape herself screaming her way down the hill, which she did and then watched over and over, laughing hysterically. After the third run, she gave up on waiting for me to get to the top and just started meeting me back up at the top of the mountain. (There was an escalator to ride back to the top after you hit bottom.) She forced me to go first on our last run, at which point the slopes were turning to pure ice and despite all of us dragging our feet, we were shooting down like crazy. I was knocking the employees down like bowling pins as well as hitting the walls, so I wasn’t too upset that it was time to be done, although we are considering going back before they close since it was so much fun! Even Penny wants to go back, so that’s a good sign that she and snow have now made peace with each other! (After our New York trip, she announced, “I am done with winter.”)

On Sunday, I was so tired and sore from our day on the mountain that I skipped my volunteer work and helped Penny make Valentine treats for some of her friends at the school. She made Chex Mix Muddy Buddies (her absolute favorite thing we have made together so far!) and we made chocolate covered strawberries. She got cute little gift boxes for her friends and we got sweet little cupcake papers and she filled one with Muddy Buddies and one with a strawberry and sealed them up. It was a fun project, and a messy one, but she was pleased with the results!

Penny came to choir practice with me on Sunday and joined the choir I sing with. (Stafford Regional Choral Society) I think it’ll be a pretty cool thing that we sing together for a few months. We will be performing in a concert in April together, so that’s awesome. When we got home, she went up to bed after we had a marathon chat, and I decided to take some of the construction paper I had around for Leah, cut out hearts, write messages of the things we love about her on them, and place them all over the house. It took about an hour to do 3 dozen hearts, and during that time, my legs fell asleep and I didn’t realize it until I stood up and promptly tipped over! :-D

So, I started in the bathroom and taped a little poem to the bathroom mirror for her. I figured she would surely see that one first thing, and I was right.

In case you can’t read it, it says “Roses are red! Carnations are pink! You are awesome! Is what we think! Happy Valentine’s Day, Penny! We love you! The Chief, Cookies, & Leah”. Yeah, I’m a master of originality!

I scattered other hearts around. On our picture of her and Leah:

On the dishwasher, I stuck one that said, “you are a great helper”, on the mirror one that said “You are beautiful inside and out”, on the door she leaves through to go to school one that said “You are a well-respected and great student”, that kind of thing.

Now, little did I know that Penny was listening to my tape dispenser from her bed, and she thought I was up to something entirely different… She vowed to stay in bed till morning, but when I woke up the next morning, every last heart was gone. She did not miss a one on any of the floors of the house. When she came home, she thanked me for putting the hearts up and said she loved them and had stuck them all to the door of her closet. But she confided, “I thought one of them would say I didn’t have to go to school today!” which is why she was so determined to find every last heart. She was so disappointed that she had to go to school on Valentine’s Day, poor thing!!! But let’s face it, she’s had a ton of snow days!

Anyway, after we had a laugh about that, we went to Walmart to do some Valentine’s shopping. Leah had already made Penny a card from a paper heart that she colored and put stickers on, but I decided to do a dinner time card exchange, so we got cards to and from each person. Penny showed me the one she bought for us before she bought it, as well as the candy she bought us, but who cares about the surprise!!! hehe We also took the opportunity to try an ATM so Penny could get some money. She has been pretty frugal with her money that she came with and hadn’t needed to use an ATM since she got here, so we were quite proud, but now things are getting a bit more expensive—she is taking the TOEFL and needed to reimburse us for the registration fee, she is taking an SAT prep class, there was a fee to join the choir, that kind of thing. Her mom had made some money available to her, but she hadn’t had the time to go to an ATM in the past couple of weeks. Happily the ATM at Walmart worked, so we were able to get her some money! (we had heard at our orientation that some students have needed to visit 3 or 4 different ATMS before finding one to work, so I was happy that the first one we tried took her card!)

When we got home, we put a heart covered table cloth on the table and made a little centerpiece out of heart garland I got on sale. She and Leah shared some strawberries and then I taught Penny how to make shrimp ceviche, which we had for dinner along with quesadillas. When The Chief got home, we all sat around the table and shared our cards, reading them aloud and there was lots of “Awwwww!” moments. We ate dinner and played Yahtzee and then Penny went upstairs to study. It really was a lovely day, compared to Mike’s and my usual “go out to dinner” and send flowers and a card kind of day. It’s interesting that trying to make the day somewhat special for Penny made it more meaningful for all of us.

So that brings the blog pretty much up to date for now. We are working on squeezing in some extra trips, albeit short ones, to Savannah, Myrtle Beach, and NYC. Penny desperately wants to go to NYC, she says it is everyone’s dream of America. She has a day off on April 8th, so I was thinking it would be a good time to go until reality smacked me in the face and reminded me that it’s Leah’s 2nd birthday and we have lots of plans! Fortunately I hadn’t booked anything!

(We did put the videos of Penny tubing on Facebook but she refuses to let me post the video to YouTube. If you’d like to see the video, send me a friend request!)

Trip to Northern New York

2011-02-14T19:39:00.001-08:00

Looking at Penny’s school schedule and trying to coordinate travel plans around it has been a fun challenge of our hosting experience. For my money, I would like to give her the chance to see as much of the United States as is possible, or at least as much of the East coast. If I play my cards right, the only state on the eastern side of the country she won’t get to before she heads home is Vermont. We have a trip to New England planned in April for her spring break and I intend to take her to New Hampshire and Maine while we are there.

But I digress! I noticed in the school calendar a string of half days at the end of January. I thought it was strange, but I also thought it would be a great chance for us to get some travel in, if Penny would only miss a couple of half days of school instead of missing whole days, which I couldn’t support. I called my dad and we made plans that we would go up to his house near the Canadian border for a mid-winter holiday.

Unfortunately, we then found out that the half days were scheduled so that the kids could have mid-term exams! So we pushed our trip back to Thursday so Penny could take her midterms, only to have “severe” weather that caused her to have several days of delays and no school. Seriously, people, she had a 2 hour delay due to RAIN. Is that nutty or what?!

So we left on Thursday morning, having determined that the weather was favorable for driving, even though on Wednesday night, there was a bit of snow and things in the DC area were pretty dicey. I hauled Penny out of bed at 10AM and we were on the road by 11:00. We stopped off at a BK in Winchester for lunch and started driving. Penny was impressed once we got into Pennsylvania with the mountain scenery we were passing. She kept asking if we were going to drive on the mountains, and I said we were going through them to go to NY, so she was happy. She snapped a couple of pictures to remember the mountains by, while reminding me she is afraid of heights!

We made it to my father’s house around 8:30PM and he had prepared a full dinner for us. I showed Penny the house where I grew up and I felt very proud of it. She kept wandering through the house saying, “I don’t know, but I really like it here.” That made me feel like a million dollars! I showed her the room she was staying in, and she is but one in a long line of exchange students who have left their mark in the room, starting with Yuko and Cornelia, onto Sofia and Francisco, and now Penny. Hilariously, my dad has my old prom dresses hanging in there, so I showed her hot 90’s prom wear! We had a nice meal and then I was exhausted from driving all day, so we went to bed!

The next morning, I was up early with the little one, but Penny slept in a bit. When she did wake up, it was broad daylight and she could not get over the snow in the backyard. I do think it was the most rural place she has ever been (my hometown has a population of about 400 people), and she was kind of awed that the house is in the forest. She quickly snapped photos.

This is my dad’s back porch under the big drift of snow in the foreground and his yard beyond.

Dad made us a big pancake breakfast while and Leah tried on his War of 1812 re-enacting gear. There was lots of giggling going on while Penny tried looking like an early American soldier.

After breakfast, Dad took a quick trip up to town and then came back and got Penny who was dressed and ready to add a new country to her list of conquests. En route to NY, we had been through West Virginia and Pennsylvania as well as New York, so she had racked up some new states, but now was time to go to Canada! We had gotten all the paperwork straightened around to ensure she’d be allowed back into the country, so around 10:30AM, my dad gave me some money for lunch at the local diner and they took off. He had a full day of activities planned for Penny so she would get the most from her experience.

The first stop was at Parliament. They found a parking spot and when they came out of the parking garage, there was a Thai restaurant at the top of the stairs. My father decided it was a sign and they should eat there, so Penny later remarked that she went all the way to Canada to eat Thai food! :) But they had a great time. Then they went to Parliament and took a tour of the building. I don’t know how much Penny enjoyed it or didn’t enjoy it, but they both look happy in the pictures!

After touring Parliament, Dad took Penny to the Canadian Museum of Civilization, which clearly had more appeal to him than it did to Penny. I was informed that she was a “typical teenager” and so he kind of rushed his way through. However, since the museum is located inside the province of Quebec, Penny got to go to two different Canadian provinces too! After the museum, Dad decided that Penny should experience the joy of the Hard Rock Cafe, and frankly, I think he was just excited he could tell people that he took a teenager to the Hard Rock and lived to tell the tale!

After dinner, he took Penny to his dancing class. My dad is big into English Country Dancing (you know, the kind you see in Jane Austen movies) and so he thought Penny would enjoy seeing it and trying it. The group at the class was considerably older than she was, and I can’t really get a straight answer about what she thought of the class, but she came home in an extremely introspective mood.

They got home long after midnight. Leah and I were already in bed. Penny stumbled out of bed around 9:00, bleary eyed and tired. She told me she had spent much of the night crying, that she was starting to realize she only has 4 months left here and that she is going to miss our family so much, and she is going to miss her friends at Stafford High. I felt like she finally made a big breakthrough. She said she wanted to really start putting the time in to make an effort with the people around her now. (remains to be seen! in my opinion, her head is still stuck in Thailand and probably will be till she gets back there, but I am proud that she’s at least having a change in thinking!)

So anyway, after a busy day and then a night of crying, she was exhausted. PopPop, however, was not to be deterred! He had a full day planned for us on Saturday which included going tubing at the local golf course, baking chocolate chip cookies, and I had invited a friend over to play Skip-Bo with us.

Penny had never seen this amount of snow before, so the idea that she could go sledding/tubing on it was a bit strange. I decided to take her on a tour of my hometown by car, and we stopped in to show her the school I had attended for many years. They have made some major renovations to the place and it really looks incredible. I am proud the community is supporting the school to do such great things even though the population of kids has seriously decreased (the current 5th grade—I think it’s the 5th grade—has a grand total of 16 children in it).

I also showed her the hospital where I was born, which has also undergone major renovations. There is a whole new wing where a doctor’s practice has been added and other things. The new wing is huge, when I was born there and through my formative years, there were only 17 beds in the whole hospital. It now functions as a nursing home and medical center. Anything serious happens, you have to go somewhere else, unless it can be fixed in the ER.

(The wing to the left is the new part of the hospital.)

Going to the golf course was a lot of fun. Penny was terrified so we put her on a “bunny slope”—namely the small hill from the parking lot to the course itself. We got a hilarious video of her going down the hill screaming—which brought rave reviews from Penny’s mother back in Thailand. She was terrified of the big hill and flatly refused to go. There were some guys there using snowmobiles to transport kids up and down the hill and they offered me a ride. Believe it or not, it was my first ride on a snowmobile, so I was very, very excited to try it out! The ride up was as thrilling as the ride down. Finally, I put the two tubes we’d brought together, and I had Penny sit on one. I told her to hold onto the handle of my tube and I was holding onto one of the handles on hers and I started to push us towards the edge of the hill. She put her foot down and tried to stop me, so I said, “Pick up your feet, Penny, we’re going!” and so she finally did and we went down, her screaming the whole way. Once was plenty, however, and Leah and PopPop were getting cold, so we got our lift back up the hill on the snowmobile (which also terrified Penny!) and then headed home. After naps and hauling Leah up and down the street on a tube, we baked chocolate chip cookies and played lots of Yahtzee.

After dinner, my friend Linette came down with her husband Tom and their son Hayden. We introduced Penny to the joys of Croghan bologna and played Skip Bo for hours. It was pretty awesome.

Sunday was a relax and take it easy day. PopPop prepared a big Polish dinner, Linette’s sister Kim came over with her husband Bruce and daughter Natalee, and we watched TV. Lots more Skip Bo, lots more Yahtzee. :-) In the late afternoon, a local girl, Emily, stopped over to meet Penny. She was going to be Penny’s escort for the day at the high school on Monday. They agreed to meet up around 7:50 to go to school. Penny then asked me what would happen if she didn’t feel well in the morning. She was very nervous about going to school, but I told her she had to go anyway!!! So consequently, she was up, dressed, and ready when Emily arrived.

And you know what? She LOVED it! She had a great time giving a speech about Thailand to all the kids in various grades, she enjoyed meeting the kids there, and came away with such a favorable impression that she really talked so much about it to her parents that they would now like to find a similar private school to which they can send Penny’s brother.

After she got home, I took her up the hill to visit my high school librarian, Rosie, at her house on the lake. We had a nice visit and Penny got to see the lake really well instead of fleeting glimpses as we drove past it.

When we got home from Rosie’s, I put in a call to my high school English teacher and he and his wife came down to visit us. It gave our visit an extra personal touch that all these people dropped in and out. I think it gave her a real slice of small town life, unlike life in the suburbs where everything is scheduled to death and no one bothers with each other most of the time.

But a storm was a-brewin’! We started getting reports that the weather was going to be real lousy up and down the 81 corridor on Tuesday, our scheduled day of departure. We evaluated the situation until 9AM, because Penny needed to get back to school and make up her midterms that she missed. But ultimately, we decided it would not be safe. I promised to take her to the “local” mall (by which I mean the mall 50+ miles away) and to the movies, so I packed her and Leah into the car since PopPop had some appointments for the day, and we drove to Watertown. I actually slid through a stop sign at Fort Drum, so I knew we had made a good decision. We stopped off at the Super Walmart—Penny was thrilled to find this outpost of civilization!—and procured supplies, as it seemed we’d be snowed in till Thursday. We picked up DVD’s, snacks, soda, cereal, fruit, a couple cheap new toys, washer fluid, and the like. My cell phone worked for about 15 minutes until the battery died after days of searching for a signal (I’d forgotten and left it on!).

Supplies procured, we headed to the Salmon Run Mall, and I was pretty surprised by how much it had changed. But one thing hadn’t changed: the perpetual motion machine. And Leah was totally enthralled by it. That kept her busy while Penny was able to look around. She was shocked at the fact that we used to drive all that way to go to the mall, but as I pointed out, there weren’t any other options closer and it gave us a lot to do! Unfortunately, the movie theater was closed down for renovations, so we had lunch and then were on our way home before the weather got any worse (it was snowing pretty good!).

After dinner, which PopPop left for us, PopPop got home and we put Leah to bed and took a break from cards and dice to watch The Hangover. This is one of Penny’s most favorite movies ever, she laughs hysterically whenever it comes on and I even gave her a copy at Christmastime. I had a funny feeling my father would like it, so we got him a copy while we were at WalMart. In essence, we needed to thank him for putting up with us for a couple of extra days since there was no way we were leaving on Wednesday. True, as I thought, he did love it, although not the language, and I had to give Penny the eye once when she repeated some pretty racy parts of the dialogue. (She has a tendency to curse like a sailor, which I am attempting to curb, but if that’s the worst form her rebellion takes, as long as she doesn’t drop the big two, I can’t get TOO upset about it).

Wednesday was really spent with serious cabin fever. We plugged into my father’s dial up, made more cookies, watched more movies, played more cards and dice, kept Leah entertained. But I was so happy and relaxed that I really didn’t care all that much about the fact that the snow was continuing! Penny was really worried about all the school she was missing, so we sat down and composed an email to all her teachers, all of whom emailed and told her not to worry, to relax and enjoy herself and she would catch up in no time.

The snow finally stopped on Wednesday night, and looking at the radar and maps and track of another storm on its way, we decided to head home on Thursday morning. It was a looooooooooooooooooooong trip home. My washer fluid was frozen and didn’t work until we hit Maryland, so I had to keep getting out to clean the windshield. Leah knew there was a long car ride ahead of her and was supremely unhappy about it and let us know it. We finally stopped at Wegman’s near Wilkes Barre for lunch and we were in Warrenton, 40 minutes from home, when Leah had a total meltdown and so we stopped there for dinner and let her play at BK. We finally made it home after 12 hours, and I was so exhausted I just about fell into bed.

It was a fabulous trip indeed, and it was a joy to share my humble roots with Penny, who is a pretty cosmopolitan girl in the end and from a well-off family. So I think it was pretty eye opening for her to have the experience of a place with no cell phone coverage, limited internet access, no Walmart, no major restaurants, and tons of trees. She loved it there, and I loved showing it to her, and I think it did give her a lot of time to think about a lot of things. We’ve had some pretty deep conversations about family, friends, and the future since we’ve gotten back. I think she is starting to really change some of her mindset, so the break did her some good! We will see where she goes from here!

Finding Siblings!

2011-02-09T10:58:00.001-08:00

Recently, I went home to visit my father, who still lives in the house I grew up in. Having an AFS student living in our home this year has caused me to reflect on being an AFS host sibling, which I was 4 times, as I have mentioned. I am a bit of a packrat, and going home is always a bit of an adventure. This trip, while Dad took Penny to Canada for a day, I started going through old piles of papers tucked in desks and plastic tubs. What should I find, but these:

That’s right, the old paper profiles from two of the AFS students we hosted in the past, Cornelia and Yuko (I’m sure you can figure out who is who!). When we were matched with Penny, we were simply sent a PDF via email and that was that. But back in the “old days”, you actually got a paper profile that your student had compiled. I remember well seeing these profiles arrive and how excited we were to look upon our new family member and wonder what they were like and how the year would go.

But in addition to the excitement of finding these, each profile offered some tantalizing new clues to aid my internet search for these girls who profoundly changed my life (in college, I went on to study international studies, having become keenly interested in foreign cultures and I even studied German 3 years after Cornelia from Germany spent her year with us!).

I typed Yuko’s name and address into Google, but nothing came up. I checked Facebook, and nothing. I’ve Googled her father, her father’s hospital where he worked, her sister, and her mother and nothing. Unfortunately, Japanese is very challenging to read, I have no idea how to do it, and it doesn’t display properly on my computer. Nor do any of the sites I found have an English translation option. For the time being, I am afraid that Yuko may be lost to us.

So I turned my attention to Cornelia. Again, I searched for her, and again nothing. So I Googled her father’s name and the company where he worked, and of all things, a Wikipedia site popped up with several other links. While my German at best is rusty, I waded through the information I found and it turns out that Cornelia’s mother and father are quite active in politics in Hamburg. Their address and phone numbers listed on their profile pages exactly matched the information that was contained in Cornelia’s profile. My first clue!!!!

I was thrilled that both of them had email addresses listed, so I quickly typed out an introductory message, used Google translate to put it into German, and sent both a German and English copy to all 3 email addresses listed. Then I closed my eyes and said a little prayer not to get a mailer back. And I didn’t!

For two days, I heard nothing, but on the third day, I got an email with the subject line “Hi from Germany!” with Cornelia’s first name and a new last name. It read in part:

what a surprise to hear from you... a very nice surprise actually…I still live in Germany, but about 200 miles from my parents. I would love to hear from you, and what you have been doing during the last 20? years.

I am totally in shock that it has been 20 years since Cornelia lived with us, but it is true, this August would be the 20th anniversary of the day she joined our family, and looking over the papers I’ve saved, August 17th or so may indeed be the date we met.

Armed with the new information, I Googled her again and I found the first picture of her I’ve seen in 19 years. And the minute I laid eyes on the picture, I knew it was her!

She looks very much the same. My father remembers her as being (and I quote) “such a sweetheart”. And I still have a videotape of the Christmas she spent with us, which is pretty awesome. I should figure out how to put it on DVD and send her a copy!

I sent her an email back and included lots of pictures of the family. I hope to hear from her again soon, but a) she used to be bad at letter writing and b) she is now a school teacher and I’m sure short on time during the week.

It’s amazing to reconnect with a member of our global family. I wonder if someday down the line, my daughter will be sitting at a computer (or whatever the latest and greatest is in 20 years), looking for Penny and wondering whatever happened to her. Hopefully, we’ll keep in touch, but if not, I’ll tuck a copy of her profile away so Leah can discover it and remember how loved she was by a girl from the other side of the world.

She Makes Me Proud!

2011-02-04T11:35:00.001-08:00

This past week, I took Penny up to Northern New York (another post on that topic will be coming up soon). Unfortunately, while we were there, we got snowed in like crazy and so I took some time out to email all Penny’s teachers and let them know the situation and let them know we’d be back ASAP. I received a wonderful collection of responses about what a great student she has been, and I feel so proud I could bust wide open. A sample from several letters:

What an exciting opportunity for her to have. She is a very bright girl and will have no problem catching back up… --Algebra teacher
I am glad Penny had the opportunity to go up to New York she is a wonderful young lady and a great student, I am proud to have her in class this year. –History teacher
Penny is awesome!!! --Drama teacher

It’s a good feeling to know that her teachers are responding well to having her in class. When we hear from Penny and her opinion of school, we often are concerned that things aren’t going well. Now we know otherwise!

Holiday Wrap Up

2011-01-16T21:29:00.001-08:00

It’s hard to believe Christmas came and went so quickly! We were so busy that we didn’t get a bunch of things done that we had hoped to accomplish, but we had an amazing holiday.

One of the things that happened is that right before Christmas, AFS asked host family bloggers to please submit a video explaining what our hosting experience meant to us. We made a video and submitted it, but never dreamed AFS would use it as their Season’s Greetings message to potential host families. You can check out the message that went out by clicking here.

We also took time while Penny had several days off from school due to snow to work on a gingerbread house kit together. Leah was not very happy with the whole project, but Penny and I enjoyed putting it together.

Christmas Eve was spent at my sister, Judy’s, house. It was the first time Penny had met her family, and she was very excited to meet her little cousins. We had a traditionally Catholic seafood dinner, and spent several hours up there having a nice time.

Christmas Day dawned bright and clear. Penny mistook my telling my mother that we would open presents between 7 and 8 as meaning in the evening, so she slept in till 9:00. Leah, of course, was up bright and early. We let her play with the Cozy Coupe car I spent all night constructing while she waited for NyNy to wake up and Nana and Grandpa Jim to arrive. Finally Ny Ny woke up and we let the girls have their presents. Penny did well. Santa brought her a new camera (she desperately needed one!), a Nintendo DSi, and an iPod Shuffle among other things. She got tons of clothes, games, DVD’s, CD’s, gift cards, and more. I think all of us went a little bit overboard this year. I read that most people this year were looking at Christmas shopping as a kind of “Oh screw it!” moment where we were all sick of being careful of our money and worrying about the economy, and that was certainly the case with our families. In fact, Leah got bored of opening presents and it took her 2 days to finally finish. One of the most sentimental gifts we gave Penny was a wall hanging (a dish towel, actually, but it is way too beautiful to be a towel!) of the Commonwealth of Virginia so she can always remember where her home in the USA is. It included Fredericksburg on the map, and here she is finding where she lives in our beautiful Commonwealth.

For dinner, we had a traditional English dinner of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and the works, but Penny does not eat beef, so despite the fact I made her ham, it was a bit of slim pickings. But part of her AFS experience is to learn and be respectful of our customs as well, and she did a good job.

The day after Christmas, my mother and Jim went home to Florida and although my father stayed an extra couple of days, he was soon on his way home too. Because there was a bit of snow, he and I didn’t get to make our annual trip to the Ginter Gardens Winter Light Show in Richmond, but I took Penny and we enjoyed it a ton. It was a cold night, although not as cold as some we have known! It was a great chance for her to practice using her new camera and we were happy to see the results, including this picture which she snapped of the two of us while we were inside an igloo constructed of lights!

A couple of days and a grudge match of bowling later, we took Penny up to DC to see the ICE show at the Gaylord National. I don’t even know how many tons of ice they use to construct a beautiful indoor wonderland made entire of ice sculptures, but it is quite beautiful to see. This year’s theme was How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and the colors were amazing. Penny was blown away by the artistry, as were we all. She also enjoyed shooting down the 2 story ice slide!

Then it was time for New Year’s. Our family is not big on New Year’s, although Penny says it is a big deal in Thailand. Because we have the young one, we don’t have the luxury of really going out, so we showed her Dick Clark on TV, gave her sparkling cider, taught her the joys of my father’s homemade pizza, and waited for midnight to come. Once it did, we heard fireworks outside, so we went out on the back porch, where we could see the fireworks going off from Old Town. A bunch of neighbors were outside banging pots and pans and screaming and yelling, so we both yelled, “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” and a chorus of Happy New Years! were heard in return.

Because my father’s family is of Eastern Orthodox descent, we also celebrate Epiphany as a holiday in our house. It is traditionally celebrated by many cultures as the day the Three Wisemen or Three Kings arrived to bestow gifts on the baby Jesus and is celebrated on January 6th, also making it the 12th and final day of Christmas. To celebrate, we started our morning with 3 gifts for each of the girls, one from each king. Leah received a Magnadoodle, a cat that scoots around by itself, and a coloring book. Penny received a guide to the TOEFL, tickets to see Hairspray, and charms for the necklace we gave her for her birthday. Then it was really time to get ready, as the big celebration for 3 Kings is to put on a huge dinner for our close friends. This year was no exception, we welcomed nearly 30 guests into our home and still managed to have a sit down dinner at a huge long table for everyone. Penny helped a lot with doing the cooking, setting tables, and keeping Leah busy and out of trouble.

We serve a mixture of traditional Russian and Polish foods, including kielbasa and pierogies, beef stroganoff, Russian black bread, Polish mushrooms, haluski, and more. We were extremely happy that Penny invited several of her friends from school to the party and two of them, Charlie and Chrissy, actually came to celebrate with her! They were really lovely girls.

We gave all our guests bowls of Chex Muddy Buddies, Penny’s favorite snack (you can see all the bowls wrapped and ready up on the fireplace and cabinet behind the tables in the above picture). Penny spent several hours the night before the party making the Chex mix for everyone, and then threatening to eat it herself! :-D Many people devoured the Chex before they ever left the table. It is definitely a crowd pleaser!

We spent the next couple of days cleaning up all the mess from the party and from Christmas itself. Penny definitely experienced some sadness and upset over Christmas ending. I think it was an amazing experience for her, and one she is not likely to get again, as in Thailand, Christmas is not celebrated. Certainly she can come celebrate with us, but nothing compares to your first Christmas, and I have to say, it was cool sharing a teenager’s first Christmas, in contrast to my toddler who will probably only start to remember Christmas next year or the year after!

We also went and met my friend, Sarah, to go see the movie The King’s Speech. Penny said she really didn’t understand what was going on, but later admitted she slept through the first part of it, so that probably had something to do with it!

It is now Martin Luther King Jr. weekend and we have been busy still. Penny has decided she would like to go to college in the US if possible, which means studying for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), so we have had tutoring sessions in the evening for that, and studying for the SAT’s, which I don’t think I can really help her with. She has a study guide for both tests and plans to take them this spring.

This weekend, she helped me organize a surprise party for Mike’s 37th birthday. She suggested we have the party yesterday even though his birthday is next Friday, so he would be caught off guard. Lo and behold, she was correct! We organized a party at Joe’s Pizza, his favorite pizza place in Northern Virginia, and he was totally surprised! It was a great moment for him and for me that I finally managed to pull it off. :) She made plans with a couple of our friends to teach her some cooking and to teach them some cooking, so I’m happy that hopefully she will branch out a bit and do some things with some new people.

We have caught up on a lot of TV. Penny has fallen totally, helplessly, and hopelessly in love with David Tutera of My Fair Wedding on We TV. She has decided her goal in the US is to meet him. If anyone has David Tutera connections, please, please let me know. Otherwise, we’re going to have to write him cheesy fan mail and see if it works. We caught up on Sister Wives on TLC, a show about a polygamist family in Utah, which caused Penny to assert “there are many strange people in America.” Like this is news!!! She has been exposed to Hoarders, Storage Wars, Billy the Exterminator, and Extreme Couponing. She is convincing me to watch more and more movies. We both loved Valentine’s Day, which we watched last night.

After Mike’s party, we sent Leah home with my friend Melissa and have enjoyed a quiet day today. Penny helped me vacuum and clean up the house a good bit, which saved me a lot of time doing things that I hate doing, notably vacuuming!

Tonight we watched the Golden Globes together and ate lobsters. She had never been presented with a whole lobster and told it was a meal in itself before, so I taught her how to use the lobster crackers to break open the shell and use a tiny fork to get the meat out. She found it a fun and exciting experience, and of course, she LOVED the lobster. I love this picture of her and her lobster, it looks to me like a heart!

We printed out our Golden Globe ballots and each filled in our best guesses as to who would win. Neither one of us should be betting on this stuff—we both did terribly on the whole thing!!!!

We definitely have some hard times in our family, it is not all sunshine and roses. We get cross with each other and there are times I am sure Penny is ready to go home and there are times we are ready for her to go home. Shortly she will attend her mid-stay orientation with AFS and I think it will be good for all of us to stop and reflect on why we decided to embark on this journey together, what we can do to successfully conclude it, what goals we have in the meantime, and what our future as a family looks like, for the next 5 months and beyond. She has several other exchange students and her liaison that she can turn to when times get tough, and I am so fortunate to have a support system of host moms around the country that I can talk to when I need an understanding ear! (Thanks, ladies!) Being a host family is just like being any other kind of family. There are personalities, some days some people don’t get enough sleep, sometimes other people have a hard day at school or at work, and culturally speaking, we are coming from 2 drastically different ways of looking at life and dealing with problems. We are doing the best we can, day in and day out. That’s the best we can ask for!!!

Before orientation, Penny, Leah, and I will be traveling to my dad’s next week for a 6 day weekend. Dad is taking Penny to Canada for a day while I catch up with friends, and we will show her what a real snowfall looks like (he has several feet up in Northern New York). We plan to go sledding, Penny will spend a half day at my old school doing a presentation about Thailand and seeing what a rural school district in America looks like, she will see the house I grew up in, she will see my hometown, and she will get to meet some of the best people I have ever known. I’m excited to get up there and have some time away! :-D

Newspaper Articles

2011-01-04T10:19:00.001-08:00

Penny’s school newspaper, the Smoke Signal, did two really nice articles, one about exchange students and one about Penny specifically. I thought it would be nice to post them.

Click here for the article about Penny. In the on-line article, they spell her last name wrong in the title.

Click here for the article about exchange programs in general.

Can It Be Nearly Christmas!?

2010-12-21T20:46:00.001-08:00

December has flown by in an absolute whirlwind. I seriously cannot believe how quickly the season has come and gone. I’ve been so excited to share the holidays with Penny. We had a TON of plans, but many of them didn’t come to fruition, just due to lack of time and of course there are times that you just can’t do everything. Consequently,we missed the Fredericksburg Christmas parade, among other things!

I had suggested she take a sick day on the 9th so we could go to the National Tree Lighting (I know, bad momma!), but it turned out she had something crazy like 3 tests that day, so she went to school and we missed seeing the tree being lit. On the 11th, we went up to my friends Paul and Kris’s house to attend their church’s annual Christmas pageant. It was a beautiful 2 hour Christmas concert with scenes from the Christmas story acted out, plus my (*cough cough*) favorite liturgical dancing and a rather passionate sermon delivered from the pastor about accepting Jesus as our savior. Penny handled it all rather diplomatically and we assured her in the car that we didn’t really feel that way about the hereafter, but she didn’t seem too concerned by it, so I’m not sure what she was thinking.

After the program, we went back to Paul and Kris’s house and met with their friends for a big lasagna dinner. They made Penny a special meatless lasagna while the rest of us feasted on beef, and I think she was pleased they made the effort. She did a great job of dealing with their 3 spazzy dogs—we had to teach her not to scream and run away but to firmly say, “No!” and push them off, and by the end of the evening, she was a pro. She also approached someone she didn’t know at the party and she struck up a conversation with them and I was very proud to watch her interaction with them.

After the party (sorry, we didn’t get any pictures!), we went down to see the National Christmas tree. I did want her to see it and I had never been to see it myself, so I thought it was very exciting. All I knew going to DC was that the tree was “somewhere near the White House” but once I got down there, I could see it shining brightly. You literally can’t miss it. I had to pull an illegal u-turn to get a parking spot, but we got an amazing parking space right outside the park and while Mike and Leah waited in the car, Penny and I went to see the tree. I was very impressed by the whole thing. They have a beautiful display set up down there with trees representing every single state in the country plus every US territory. They have a Santa’s village, but the line was crazy and we didn’t wait. There were hundreds of people down there looking at the tree and it was quite spectacular, particularly with the White House so close by. I can say it definitely won’t be my last trip to see it!

This past week has been similarly busy. I have been busy with choir rehearsals and Penny babysat for us while Mike and I finished up our Christmas shopping. We’ve been busy wrapping gifts and Penny has helped too, although I think she was of the opinion that if she helped with the wrapping, she’d get a peek at her gifts. Sorry, Penny, I wrapped yours first! Monday, Penny stepped outside to discover a quarter inch of snow on the ground and she was so excited she even knelt down, touched it, and tasted it. The neighbor was out there and looked at her like she was a little bit crazy, but she was so excited! I promised her we’d get more before it was over and she’d probably be sick of it. She was disappointed that she didn’t get a picture of it, but leave it to me, I knew she’d be in a rush and wouldn’t have taken a picture, so I took one for her. She had to write a descriptive essay this week about her favorite winter, so she wrote about seeing snow for the first time and the fact that I took the picture and wrote “I laughed until I cried. My mum always knows what I want.” That touched my heart. :0D

Wednesday, we went to the tree lot at the local Catholic church and picked out our tree.

And yes, it was FREEZING out there. When we got home, we put the tree in the stand and I conned her into watering it. Then I dug out a craft kit of ornaments and Penny and I made ornaments to put on the tree. It was a kit of bird cutouts that were adhesive and little tubes of glitter that you shook over them as you removed the adhesive coverings a bit at a time. It was fun project and definitely a good thing to do AFTER the wee one went to bed!

Thursday morning, I happened to get up early with Leah and checked Facebook to discover that Spotsy schools were closed, so I checked the SHS web page and discovered that even though it wasn’t snowing, Penny had been granted a snow day. I intercepted her just as she was about to leave and she couldn’t believe she had heard me correctly. Then she said, “Should I be happy or not? I am already up and dressed!” I told her to be happy, we’d have fun together. So she decided to work on her homework for a while instead of going back to bed. Once Leah was up and we were settled in downstairs, Penny came thundering down to announce that the snow had started. She was positively giddy. I told her to get her coat on and we’d go out to WalMart and grab supplies to bake cookies and do some things together. When we got outside, it was like the world stopped. Penny just stood in the falling flakes and gazed in wonder. I was so happy about her childlike awe of the whole thing. She said, “I feel like I’m in a movie!” She went in and got her camera and I got mine and we had fun taking pictures and catching snowflakes.

The little things about snow were the most impressive to her—how it stuck to her sneakers, how it got dirty near the road, how it turned to ice when it got clumped into a pile, catching flakes with her tongue. It was ADORABLE!

We loaded up with supplies at Walmart and then came home and I taught Penny the Cherepon Method of putting lights on the tree. She was of the misguided opinion that you just sort of put them on there in a swirly motion and that was that. I corrected that misconception right away with my dad’s tried and true “push the lights in and pull them back out” method (which doesn’t sound like it makes a whole lot of sense until you see it in action!) and we wound up putting 600 lights on the tree. I could probably have done another strand on there, but I was out of lights and didn’t feel like going back out, so we made do. We were both sweating and tired afterwards, so we took a break and baked cookies in the afternoon while Leah was sleeping. I had been sick for almost 2 weeks and by Thursday I was feeling absolutely miserable from pain, exhaustion, and just not feeling well, so when Penny and I sat down to play cards at 9:00, I started debating going to the local urgent care clinic. Eventually I abandoned her and went over to the doctor and good thing, as I had a massive sinus infection, the second one I’ve had in 3 years. (I know that doesn’t sound half bad, but in general I’m very healthy and this is not anything I encountered in the first 32 years of my life, so to suddenly get these infections SUCKS!) The doctor told me not to go home but to go straight to the 24 hour pharmacy and get prescriptions, so I did, and consequently Penny was in bed before I got home. But…

Friday, Penny had ANOTHER school day, so while Mike was at work, we got the house ready for company, since my best friend from college Joe was coming to spend the weekend and my dad was arriving on Saturday. We also baked her beloved raspberry bars, which made her happy since we made 2 pans worth. Joe and Mike took the early train and got in at 5:40 and Penny and I tried our hand at making stir fry together. It came out pretty well! After dinner, all of us went into the living room to decorate the tree. Leah presented Penny with an ornament that says, “I’m the big sister” and that was the ceremonial first ornament on the tree, placed by Penny herself. Then all of us got into the act, listening to Penny’s new favorite musical artist, Kenny G. She says she loves jazz and the saxophone so when I was at CVS and saw he had a Christmas CD other than the Miracles CD I already had, I picked it up for her. She loved it.

Saturday morning I had dress rehearsal for my concert all morning and when I got home, we ordered pizzas for lunch. Penny spent much of Saturday in her room. I think we had a lot of together-time and she just wanted to relax and listen to music, which was fine. In the afternoon, Joe and I baked cookies while Leah slept and Michael hid out in his man cave. My father arrived Saturday night, which was a lot of fun since Penny just adores him.

Sunday was my big day, the day of my choir concert. I was very excited as we had been rehearsing a lot and I was ready to sing, but as the time drew close, my dad, Penny, and Leah hadn’t arrived. As we lined up to go, I still hadn’t seen them anywhere, so I was really relieved to see Penny come running out of the ladies’ room and wish me good luck. She enjoyed the concert a lot and I enjoyed performing in it. Afterwards a bunch of friends met me with flowers, which was a sweet surprise as well!

Afterwards, Dad, Michael, Penny, Leah, and I went home and had dinner, and then Penny, Mike, and I worked on a project for AFS. They asked host family bloggers to make a video describing what hosting an AFS student meant to us, so we decided to include Penny in our video. The only downer about the whole thing was that Leah was already in bed since it was so late, so she doesn’t appear at all. However, if you’d like to see our video, you can do so at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J6I89QHym0 I am pretty pleased with the final result. :-D

Yesterday, for reasons known only to the county, Penny had a 2 hour delay, but still nearly missed the bus. She still declines to wear her coat to school, but I’ve given up. If she gets pneumonia, so be it. I tried to make a lasagna for dinner, but it didn’t congeal in time, so we had lasagna soup and then I took Penny to school because she was performing in her second concert at school in the choir. She was in the women’s choir and they sang 3 selections, a Russian song, a Japanese song, and Santa Claus is Coming to Town. She did a great job and the choir sounded amazing!

Today she had a full day of school (must have been hard after all those days off plus a delay!) and then when she got home, we had dinner and then she and I picked up Mike and we all headed over to the mall for the flash mob chorus I was participating in. Penny needed some pants, so she picked up a new pair while we were at the mall too, which was great and she ran into a bunch of people she knew from school, which I think was great for her! We came home and she has been studying for her government test. Tomorrow she has early release and then she will be done with school until 2011!!!! I can’t believe it!

Thursday evening we are going to a potluck party at her liaison’s house and Friday afternoon, we will go up to a family member’s house for dinner for Christmas Eve before the big event on Saturday. Penny has decided to call home this weekend, so we told her that she can as long as it’s not during the big events on Saturday morning. I’ll make a special Christmas post post-Christmas! Until then, I wish you all a simply amazing Christmas with those you love!

Updates Long Overdue!

2010-12-09T18:44:00.001-08:00

I am waaaaaaaaay overdue for updating this blog, and I do apologize. It has been over a month, but my gosh, I can’t believe how busy we’ve been!

I am learning not to make plans any more. We make plans and then everything changes. We have planned to go back to DC since our first trip back in August and guess what? We haven’t made it yet! Sheesh!!!

November was an absolute whirlwind. I honestly can’t believe it has been and gone, and I have no idea where it went!!! The only thing that really stuck in my head when I sat down to write this update is our Thanksgiving vacation. I looked back through our photos and I think perhaps it’s possible that I’ve even been too busy to take pictures! I am extremely thankful that I had in mind to keep a paper journal for Penny. I found an awesome journal at the local bookstore and every night with only one exception so far (the night we arrived at my mother’s house at 2AM), I have written in it daily. I will make a bound photocopy of it before I give it to Penny at the end of the year.

Anyway, here’s what I can tell you for sure we did:

November 9, Penny performed in her first concert at school. She sang with her choir class. The class is divided into men and women and at the time, Penny was singing second soprano. The women’s choir sang 3 or 4 songs and we proudly waved to her from our seats in the back of the auditorium—as close as we could get unfortunately by the time we got over there! We were very grateful that our friend Sherry Harrison came to the concert to support Penny and afterwards we all gave her flowers and met her friend, Stephanie, for the first time.

November 11 was Veteran’s Day and we took Penny up to Ikea to meet up with my friend Emily. Penny had never been to Ikea before, so we went over there and had lunch and wandered around. Penny liked the chocolate cake a lot!

Somewhere in there, Penny also auditioned for the district choir. She was not ultimately selected, but we were so proud of her for having the guts to even try. Her choir teacher ultimately decided to move her to the alto section, where I think she is a lot more comfortable singing as well. She is such a songbird. She loves to sing here all the time and has music on a lot. She has taken a particular shine to Wham! so if we hear that there is a resurgence in Wham!’s popularity in Thailand next year, George Michael can send me a cut of the royalties.

November also marks a major holiday in Thailand, that being Loy Krathong. Loy Krathong is a festival in Thailand in which the Thai people create beautiful boats out of banana leaves and send them floating down the river hoping to have the sins of their year absolved. You can read more about it by clicking here. Penny decided to teach us how to make our own krathongs and we would float them here locally to celebrate her customs. Penny had a lot of leftover tissue paper from her birthday paper, and cut it into strips to fashion a rough equivalent of the leaves that would typically be in a krathong. She taught me the folding method, which I struggled with quite a bit at first, but after folding 40 or 50 of them, I quickly got the hang of it and we made a krathong for each member of the family. I sent Penny’s mom a picture and she suggested we fill them with flowers as would be traditional, so on the day we were due to set them off, November 21, I went and picked up carnations at the local grocery store. We filled them and sent them down the river at a local park here in Fredericksburg. It was a very lovely moment.

My friend Jacalyn of Emerald Lens Photography came with us to take family photos for our Christmas cards and she photographed the occasion as well. There are some pictures on her photo blog if you are interested.

Photo credit: Jacalyn Stanley, EmeraldLens.info

On November 23rd, all our company began arriving for Thanksgiving. My father was here and our best friends Mike and Lesley flew up from Atlanta. We had an awesome Thanksgiving together and Penny enjoyed making a big meal with us and she really loved the turkey! We put her to work in the kitchen and she was into everything up to her elbows, from making pie to making gravy to setting our table just beautifully.

Post-Thanksgiving we took our annual trip up to the Christmas Attic in Alexandria. Afterwards, we started decorating the house for Christmas, most notably putting up Christmas lights, which Penny also enjoyed helping with.

(Yes, she was insane enough to be wearing shorts!)

Once everyone left and we took a deep breath, we started getting ready for Christmas. I perform with a local choir, so I have been running back and forth to choir practice as well as my regular book club meeting. Penny has had a ton of tests and papers and projects she’s had to do. We got out all our decorations for Christmas except the tree, which we will put up the weekend of December 18th. We have started baking cookies and we attended a free concert by the US Marine Corps Band at Wolf Trap Performing Arts Center. Penny has never experienced cold weather like we have here in Virginia (and I have to say, it’s been an exceptionally cold winter so far!), so we talked her into buying a coat, explaining that her yellow sweatshirt was not going to cut it. I had gotten Leah a little lamb hat to keep her warm and Penny fell madly in love with it and looked all over for a “cute” hat like that, but couldn’t find one. Fortunately, I found one at JC Penney’s and bought it for her and we gave it to her as an early Christmas present. She and Leah looked adorable at Wolf Trap.

After we had been there ten minutes, however, Penny exclaimed, “I have changed my mind about seeing snow!”

Penny also made a new friend in a missionary, Jon, who has just returned from a couple of years living in Thailand and was looking for someone to experience Thailand and Thai culture and language with as he adjusts to life back in the US. They met up at the mall and spent a couple of hours together chatting and whatnot. Penny also had an amazing time spending a night at her liaison’s house with 2 of the other exchange students. They went to the theater to see Tangled in 3D, Penny’s first American cinematic experience. Now she wants to find someone to go see Narnia with her, as she is a great fan of it. Hopefully she will find a friend to go with her!

We have introduced Penny to the tradition of the Advent wreath and have been teaching her how to light a match and then she can light the candles. (I was a regular firebird by the time I was 10, probably due to the Girl Scouts and their evil camping influence, so the idea she could be 18 and not know how to light a match struck me as very strange!) We do a reading each week, which I think she feels a bit more relaxed about since it is not overly religious in tone.

Penny also helped us with our traditional “stuffing of the Christmas cards”—something she cannot believe we did. We mailed out 73 of our 74 cards so far, and she couldn’t believe that many Americans send out that quantity at the holidays. I explained that Christmas is a time to remember and celebrate the love we have for our family and friends and that while it is time consuming, it is so nice to give and receive cards to those we love. I don’t know if she was convinced or not, but she IS enjoying when we receive cards. My mom sent her a special Christmas card to commemorate her trip to Disney and Penny was so touched!

She is now in the spirit of the whole present thing. Last night she helped me wrap Leah’s presents, as well as gifts for my niece and nephew. She snooped around a bit since there were a few presents for her in the pile downstairs, but she didn’t gather much from her reconnaissance. Most of her presents are wrapped and stashed elsewhere because I suspect she is a bit of a spy, just like I was! Patience, Penny, only 16 more days till you get your loot! :)

Of course, we have crammed in tons of Skip Bo and Yahtzee and yesterday Penny and I finally, finally, finally finished Super Mario Bros. for Wii. Now we are trying to decide what to do to fill our time since we have been sweating that game for months!

This weekend we will have dinner with friends tomorrow evening, attend a Christmas pageant at my friend’s house on Saturday and hopefully take a quick trip into DC to have a peek at the national Christmas tree. Sunday our neighbor has invited us to see her son in the church Christmas pageant. We will also probably start baking serious quantities of cookies soon, which is something Penny is extremely excited about. She will be performing in another choir concert on the 16th and she has offered to babysit Leah and the neighbor’s little boy so Lisa and I can go Christmas shopping this week and I can finish it off! Then my friend Joe will arrive on the 17th for the weekend that will include putting up our tree, my concert, my father’s arrival, taking cookies to the neighbors, and last minute preparations before the big day. I hope to sneak in a trip to the mall to get a picture with Santa Claus too.

Hopefully it won’t take me 6 weeks to update from Christmas and New Year!!! It’s hard to believe we are coming up on 4 months since the kids arrived, and only 6 months of this wonderful experience left. Impossible to believe!

The Rest of October

2010-11-01T06:35:00.001-07:00

The rest of October is gone in an absolute blur. I remember taking Penny and Leah to the mall for their photo shoot, and I more or less don’t remember a thing afterwards until I looked at the calendar today and saw a big, fat number 1 on it and thought, “Oh man, it’s November already!”

Penny did go to Homecoming with her friend JB and met up with some new friends at the dance itself. She looked lovely in her dress and she had a very good time going, although I think she would have liked to have danced more than she did. Her friend is not much of a dancer and she felt badly leaving him alone while she went to dance. Still, they had a great time having dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings with JB’s cousin beforehand and then going the dance and coming home. Penny looked beautiful and felt great in her new dress, so I’d call the night a success!

Another big event this month was that we went to Florida for my mother’s 60th birthday party. We had been planning this for a while and we were all very excited about it. My mom lives about 90 minutes south of Orlando, so a trip to Disney was definitely called for. I left the little one with her father and grandmother and took Penny to DisneyWorld’s Magic Kingdom for the day. It was a lot for her to take in and she was absolutely exhausted by 2:00 in the afternoon, but we managed to go on quiet rides then, like the Carousel of Progress, where she could take a little nap and get some rest. We were laughing and joking with each other about daring ourselves to go on the “scary rides” like Space Mountain and Splash Mountain, but ultimately my host mom instinct kicked in and I decided that Penny was not going back to Thailand regretting the fact that she hadn’t done things. I always tell her that she will regret the things she didn’t do much more than the things she did do. So I did the rides too, even though I really didn’t want to. But it was fun. Space Mountain is probably better for me than other coasters, since it’s in the dark and you really can’t see what’s about to happen. There’s no time to get scared. Penny was screaming the whole time, and she informs me that I laughed. We did every ride either of us wanted to and a few I’d never done before in all my trips to Disney and left by about 7:30PM. It was a beautiful day and a lot of fun.

The next day was my mom’s party. We had a beautiful time celebrating my mom and her special day. We did a lot of decorating, we made centerpieces, we put together cookie trays, got cake, entertained my mom’s friends, and made a glorious mess. My mom is a special lady, and has packed a ton of special into 60 years, so even though I gave her a big hug and she and I both burst into tears, it was a good kind of crying. I hope she felt all the love in that room—I know we all did!

Monday, we took Penny for her first glimpse of the Atlantic Ocean. It was a beautiful day but the hurricanes were churning up the water pretty good, so the waves were very choppy. She elected not to get into the water, but at least she got to see it.

All in all, Florida was a great time. We came home exhausted, and grateful to be in our own beds, but very grateful to have had such a wonderful time and gotten to know so many people.

Then it was one week till Halloween!!! Penny was very excited about Halloween and it is really her first big American holiday, so we were excited too. I had great plans for trips to the pumpkin patch, baking cookies, etc. but the wheels came off our family bus for a while and most of our weekend was taken up with meetings with our AFS liaison and a good deal of sulking, screaming, crying, and door slamming. I am happy to say that things are better now, but it was very stressful and consequently we didn’t get much done! She did go to her friend Victoria’s party on Saturday night, though, which was great, since she was able to meet some more kids and have a good time. She even told us not to wait up for her. I sort of didn’t, I just waited up in my bed instead of waiting in the living room.

So we crammed it in yesterday. When Penny got up, there was apple cider and donuts waiting for her. We carved pumpkins together—something she’d never done before. It was fun to hear her when I got the top off the first pumpkin and pulled up and the strings and seeds came with it. She really cleaned out her pumpkin with gusto, though, and took to the spirit of the thing right away.

She carved her own design into her pumpkin and she was happy with it, even if one of the eyes fell apart on her! I made Leah a little happy pumpkin and in the other pumpkins we had gotten, we used some Mr. Potato Head type pieces that they sold at Target a few years ago to make a pirate pumpkin and a diva pumpkin. The were all nicely displayed on the front steps.

Costumes were cool too. I let Penny have the ultimate say in what Leah would be this year, and she chose a pumpkin outfit we found on line. Leah looked super-cute, I must say, even though I wanted to go with a pirate princess costume. I’m happy with the pumpkin! (My sister-in-law pointed out that Leah is going to start forming opinions about what she wants to be soon enough and I may not have another chance to dress her as a pumpkin, so I should strike while the iron is hot!) Penny chose to wear her traditional Thai dress, something she had brought with her from home and has decided she will also wear to the prom. She looked beautiful in it, it was a cream colored lace top and a gorgeously patterned golden skirt. Michael and I wore our traditional Frankenstein and Witch hats that we got the first year we were married. We cut a beautiful picture as a family.

I took the girls out trick-or-treating starting at about 6:30PM. Penny kept asking what time it was and could we go yet and so we left as soon as we saw other kids coming out. We went to all the neighbors up and down the street, but it was COLD!!!! and Penny was freezing in her outfit. She had on a sweatshirt over it and at each house she would take it off before ringing the bell.

Halloween is dying, at least in Fredericksburg. It makes me sad—Halloween was such a special night when I was a kid, but I guess now people are scared about taking candy from strangers, so they take candy from strangers in church parking lots now. Our neighbors had invited us out to their church for the “trunk and treat” where you go around to parked cars and accept candy from people’s trunks, so after we finished our block, I put the girls in the car and we drove over to Falmouth Baptist and picked up loot and hot dogs to boot!

On the way back, we stopped off at JB’s house, where the dog got loose and Penny ran in circles screaming with the dog barking and chasing her—it was some Halloween excitement!!! Then we went to Mike’s radio buddy Jack’s, and then I told Penny I needed to get Leah home. She said she wanted to keep going, so I gave her my cell phone and came home. She was home about 15 minutes later, having gone to only 3 other houses before the cold got to her and she called it a night.

We all sat together at the table while she counted her loot. She and Leah bagged 150 pieces of candy total, the top 3 of which were M&M’s, Butterfingers, and KitKats. She was very excited by the gum she got—the kind in the red, yellow, and blue wrapper that turns rock hard in your mouth after about 5 minutes. She apparently loves the stuff! I’m going to go find her some today on sale.

Shortly afterwards, we perused our pictures and then it was bedtime.

So now it’s November and time to look ahead to the crazy season, which is getting underway. I can hardly believe it. Penny has off tomorrow for election day, so we are going to DC for the day. For Veteran’s Day, which I think she also has off and which Mike has off, we’re going to Richmond for the day. Our best friends and my father are all coming for Thanksgiving, then we’re hoping to make a trip to NYC, and then it’ll be Christmas time!!! Time for cookies and shopping and presents and trees and excitement. Penny is simultaneously praying for and dreading snow. We’ll see what happens!

Two months?! What?!

2010-10-11T19:40:00.001-07:00

Wednesday marks the two month “anniversary” of Penny’s arrival to our golden shores. That means 1/5 of her stay is over. I can hardly wrap my mind around that! It does not seem like 2 months at all. Seriously.

It’s been another busy week. Mike’s parents left on Wednesday morning after a nice stay and visit with us. I decided to take the girls to the mall on Friday to have their pictures taken together, so on Thursday I introduced Penny to Burlington Coat Factory and she enjoyed shopping there but didn’t get anything to wear for her pictures. I wound up finding a sweet little dress for Leah, and so we matched up what Penny had in her closet as best we could. I had to talk her out of a graphic t-shirt. :-)

Friday we went to the photo shoot and as long as Leah was clinging to Penny, she did just fine. The minute Penny stepped away, Leah wanted nothing more to do with the whole venture and screamed and cried. So we got a few good pictures and some hilarious ones of Leah crying (I was also trying to get her 18 month photos).

While we were waiting for the photos to print out, Penny ran into some friends who encouraged her to go to the Homecoming Dance. She said she didn’t know and I took the bull by the horns and explained that Penny was nervous to go on her own without a date. The girls quickly exclaimed that they were not going with dates and she should just go anyway! This set the wheels in Penny’s head spinning. She asked me what I thought.

I told Penny that she will be more likely to return to Thailand thinking, “Oh, I should have gone to Homecoming!” than she would be to think, “Oh, I should never have gone to Homecoming.” I told her we always regret the things we don’t do more than we regret the things we did do. She said, “you want me to go?” and I said, “I want you to experience as much of being an American teenager as you possibly can and want to.” This has been my philosophy all along. I am not going to force her to do anything, but I am going to encourage her to do everything.

We took about 3 more steps and she said, “Ok, I am going to go.” I was excited and said I would take her dress shopping over the weekend.

On Saturday, Mike’s sister arrived for a 2 day visit, driving her hot little sports car, which Penny totally fell in love with. Every time we went out, Michael and Paula were in one car and Penny, Leah, and I were in our station wagon. Penny would spend the entire time watching in the rearview mirror as Paula followed us. Sunday, we all went to Paula’s hotel to go swimming and afterwards, I hung back with Paula and asked her if she would mind driving Penny around a bit in her car. She said no problem, so I asked Penny if she’d like to ride in it? The grin that stretched across her face didn’t abate the entire evening. We took a picture of her sitting in the car and I watched as much as I could as she happily smiled and sat in that car for the ride of her life, her first time in a sports car. Paula even put the top down for her. Penny was in heaven.

Today we had a real AFS kind of day. Leigh and Lucas of A Viking in South Carolina were in the area visiting family and seeing the sites of DC and Leigh and I chatted about getting together for a bit to meet after lots of fun on Facebook and blogs. Even though both Penny and Lucas were like, “We’re doing what with whom!?” we went ahead as host moms do and made plans to meet up. Ultimately, Leigh decided to stop over at the house on their way back to SC, and they made it over around 12:30 this afternoon. It was so neat to exchange hugs and hellos and sit and chat for a while about AFS and school and America and Sweden and Thailand and all of that good stuff. Leah woke up from her nap about mid-visit and Lucas convinced her he wasn’t so bad, so she offered him the $5 bill from her “Pat the Cat” book, which they swapped back and forth for a while. They didn’t have long to stay as they had a long journey ahead of them, but it turned out Leigh knew some girls from Thailand who Penny had met at AFS camp, so that was cool. And we have been told to let them know if we are in SC any time. Although she was quiet, as she always is with new people, when Leigh and Lucas left, Penny asked if we had any plans to go to SC. I think they made quite an impression on her!

After they left, we went dress shopping. I explained semi-formal wear to Penny, who just wanted to go back to Burlington to find something. I told her we’d need to go to the mall to get a dress, and we tried some at JC Penney’s first, but Penny was so embarrassed by how much skin they showed that she refused to let me even see them! We went to Deb and tried on a bunch of dresses, but she insisted on keeping on her t-shirt over her top half, so all I could see were the skirts. I texted Mike, “Unless the Amish are suddenly in the semi-formal dress business, we are in serious trouble here.” Penny really wanted something modest that didn’t expose a lot of skin, but the style these days is strapless! Finally, we found a lace bolero jacket and decided she would wear that over top of whatever dress she chose. She found a lovely little black dress and that settled it! I hope she’ll let me take a few pictures on Saturday evening. The dress she chose really made her smile and I think she will be happy wearing it.

So that closes out Penny’s second American holiday, Columbus Day. I had plans to drive Penny up into the mountains to see the fall leaves and then to go to Luray Caverns, but with the decision about homecoming and after looking at our schedule for this week, it just wasn’t in the cards for a trip up there. Hopefully sometime soon!

Tomorrow we will go to the school for a Vera Bradley bingo night. Penny’s friends down the street invited her to attend and I had already learned about it and asked my friend Wendy to go, so we will all meet up at the school and win some bags! Hopefully we all get lucky :-D Wednesday and Thursday, I’m busy shuttling Michael and Leah to various appointments and then Friday I think we have a down day. Saturday Leah will go off to my friend’s overnight and we will get Penny ready for her big dance. Sunday I am volunteering at NPR in the evening, and then it will only be 5 days till our Florida trip. I’m shocked that it’s all coming about so quickly!!!! There’s only 10 weeks or so till Christmas. Sheesh!

Our First Disagreement

2010-10-05T21:10:00.001-07:00

Like any family, an exchange family is prone to disagreements and getting on each other’s nerves from time to time. Our family is no different. I wanted to blog about this because all of us feel a need to present our families in the most glowing terms possible, and to encourage others to host and portray what a wonderful experience we are having. All of that is true. I would say without hesitation that my family is pretty darned awesome. Our hosting experience has been better than I hoped for in my wildest dreams. I hope that my friends and family all consider hosting a student and enjoying this experience for themselves!

But there does come a point when the laughter and hugs and “way to go”s and joy and love gives way a bit to some frustration and occasionally an argument. That’s what happened in our family today.

The AFS Host Family Handbook contains a chart of the Cultural Adjustment Cycle, which tells how both the student and family may be feeling at certain milestones in the exchange year. It begins at Stage 1 with the selection and arrival, and all the excitement that go with being matched with your student and picking them up at their orientation point and bringing them home. This leads to culture shock, which the student is experiencing because absolutely everything around them is new. This gives way to Stage 2, when there is surface adjustment, but leads into mental isolation, which I think is where Penny is at the moment. She is starting to feel more at ease at school, feeling a bit better about understanding English, has a few friends, and is enjoying living with our family. However, she does complain about a lack of good friends like she enjoys back home. Her friends right now are still rather tentative friends and they are all still getting to know one another. Meanwhile, for the host family, AFS suggests that small misunderstandings may become more irritating, since we might all expect that Penny has adjusted to being here.

I think a good part of that is what happened today. Penny called from school to say she needed a ride home. I was taking a nap, as my in-laws were visiting, which affords me time to relax a little bit as they love to take care of the little one. Consequently, Michael answered the phone. He came upstairs and told me that Penny needed a ride home and as it was 3:30, I got up and got ready. I tried calling Penny, but her cell phone went straight to voice mail, so I went over to the school.

And I sat there until 4:45. I paged her over the school’s PA system, but she never showed up. My own cell phone’s battery had died (it has great battery life, so I never think to check it), so I was not able to call home and find out whether Penny was home or not, and no one at the school would allow me to use a phone. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a pay phone these days?! Finally I found one at a local gas station and called home, and sure enough, Penny had gotten a ride from a friend. She had not wanted to bother her friend and ask to borrow their phone to call us and let us know she had a ride.

Now, for those of you who know us, or you may have inferred from reading this blog, Michael is totally blind. This means that I am solely responsible in the house for all the driving, and driving is one of my major pet peeves. Oh, maybe if we lived in a rural setting where driving somewhere 5 miles away would be easily attainable in 5 minutes, I wouldn’t mind it so much. But we live in the greater Washington DC metro area, an area well known for its traffic. Many is the time I have gotten stuck somewhere and it has taken me 20 minutes to go a half mile.

And the fact of the matter is, I can never say to my husband, “Hey, why don’t you go pick up milk at the grocery store?” or “I don’t feel like taking you to your doctor’s appointment, you take the car” or “Would you mind mailing this package on your way to work?” Because I am the ride to the store, to the doctor, to the post office, to work, and to anywhere else we want to go. I know you single folks feel my pain in a way, but if you are married, imagine never, ever being able to ask your spouse to run an errand and every time your spouse needs an errand run, you have to do it. Now add a toddler. I get to sit through 3 times the doctor’s appointments. I get to do all the shopping for the family and if one of us forgets something, I get to go pick it up (as happened recently when the Mister forgot he needed toothpaste). I do the shopping for family gifts and the shipping and the packing and I sign every card and either cook every meal or drive us to get dinner or take out or sign the delivery slips when our delivered dinners arrive. Blindness is a pervasive disability, and even though Mike is an amazingly accomplished man and he could very easily sign the delivery slip, most people are extremely uncomfortable among people who are blind, particularly if they have no ongoing contact with that person. This is one of the things that has made Penny such an extraordinary addition to our household: she jumped right in with both feet and never treated “The Chief” any differently than she treated any other adults she has met on her adventure thus far.

So the fact that I drove across town for no reason whatsoever Really. Pissed. Me. Off. I had worked up a full head of steam by the time I got back, and when I walked in the door, there was Penny, ready to great me with a chipper, “Hello!” and a laugh. To which, I must say, I did not respond well. I said as calmly as I could that I did not want to talk with her just then and needed to go somewhere and calm down.

Because, you see, this is how I deal with anger. As a kid, I was always sent to my room to cool off.

However, Penny was devastated that I would not speak with her. She went up to her room and refused to come out. Michael’s parents were leaving and wanted to say goodbye since Penny declined to go out to dinner with us, so I went out to the car so she could feel comfortable saying goodbye to them. She burst into tears while hugging them and said she was not staying here and goodbye forever (the kid has clearly inherited my flair for the dramatic!). Mike’s mom came out to the car and was very upset by the whole thing. We went to dinner and I talked with her about how exchange students typically adjust and promised that as soon as we got home, we would all sit down and chat.

On the way home, Michael and I chatted about how we wanted things to turn out and when we got home, he went upstairs and got her to come down. She was still crying, but I think she wanted it over as much as we did. We had a very long chat and even in working out our problems, I felt as if I learned so much.

We talked about the different ways families handle conflict. In Penny’s family, there is lots of yelling and in some cases, even laughter, and then it’s over. In our house, the only people who argue are me and Michael, since Leah is still too little. Our signature style is that we get grumpy with each other, and I retreat to cool off. I am aware of the fact that when I get angry, I tend to say things I don’t mean. Because I tend to have my feelings hurt rather easily, I don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings, and I want to only say things that I know won’t linger, as I definitely retain garbage other people say to me. Plus, my dad doesn’t like dealing with emotional women, so we always got sent to our rooms to settle down, as I said before in this post.

As we talked over what had happened, I admitted that my cell phone was dead too, so communication was definitely hampered. I told Penny I appreciated her attempt at making life easier by getting a ride, but that from now on if she called needing a ride and couldn’t get ahold of me personally to change plans, she should stay put and wait for me to come and get her. She said she was sure she would get home before I had to leave, and she really was trying to save me a trip. But she has agreed to wait at her school or wherever she is and not leave if she doesn’t talk directly to me.

One of the things that she said was that she was devastated because she is having a hard time understanding things at school and has a real lack of good friends, and the thing she loves the most is her host family and she was afraid that she had messed that up and she was so upset about it. We explained that we love her and consider her a permanent part of the family, and that one little incident like this is not going to change that. She ‘fessed up that she was so upset she had called her family in Thailand and woken them up—her father, mother, and sister all got on the phone with her. We told her it was fine and no problem, we understood that since we had gone out it had brought her some comfort and maybe helped her get in the mindframe to be prepared to talk with us. Her father’s advice was to find something to do, so she had made us a sign:

I told Penny that in my estimation, a family argument was bound to happen. No one gets along 100% of the time and as is often the case early in an exchange, miscommunication is the source of a lot of it, which I think is what happened in this situation. I explained to her that a disagreement didn’t mean we don’t love her or don’t want her around any more, it’s just a way of human relationships expanding and that now we all understand each other a little bit better.

We ended our frank discussion with big hugs and laughter and a few more tears and even Michael told me a few things about myself that I hadn’t considered and I had to agree with (whenever he and I argue, I never tell him I’m sorry). We made plans for the upcoming long weekend and then Penny went up to bed. It is sometimes a challenge being an adult, especially when you don’t want to be the one to say, “C’mon and let’s make this better and oh yeah, I’ll admit my mistakes too.” But it’s so worth it in the end. And while we didn’t yell at each other, our “make up” session did inspire more than a few laughs. Our family bond is even tighter now. Love our girl!

Another Week Has Gone By

2010-09-27T11:10:00.001-07:00

Can it really be that a week ago already we were celebrating Penny’s birthday? I can’t even believe it! This past week has been full of new experiences for our girl and interesting discussions and just general life.

Penny joined the choir at school as one of her elective classes. She is very much enjoying it, although she says she cannot sing. This is not deterring her, however, from at least auditioning for the special select choir, and I’m proud of her for trying. I’ll be doubly proud if she makes it! However, the choir is a bit intense. Not only does she have to sing, but she has entered the great American enterprise known as fundraising. They sent her home last week with an order form for pies and flower bulbs. I put a status on Facebook and called several family members, who agreed to buy pies, but we did feel Penny needed to sell some pies. She all but begged us not to make her ask our neighbor, but when he came over to get some chairs, I called him into the house and told him Penny had a question for him. She was ready to kill us, but just as sweet as she could be, she said to him, “I am looking for customers to buy my pies.”

I just about died. I thought that was the most adorable way to put it. And apparently so did he, because he bought a pie. She has since sold several more pies, although she finds the whole thing quite strange and she hates doing it. Still, I like the idea that in addition to all the other boundaries she’s pushed on her exchange, she also has to push this one, and it involves communication and persuasion of total strangers. She tried that old “But I don’t know these people” routine with me, but I pointed out that she’s living in an entire country of people she doesn’t know, and what a great way to get to know them!

The pie sales also sparked a personal interest in pie in Penny, who has never eaten a pie. While we were shopping yesterday, she asked if we could make pie, so I agreed and headed for the produce department to pick up apples. But she didn’t want apple pie, she wanted pecan pie. Mmmmm-kay. Firstly, I have never made a pecan pie. Secondly, neither the Chief nor I likes pecan pie. But, if that’s what she wanted, that’s what she’d get (and I got apples anyway!). We went to the baking aisle and I had to ponder what goes into a pecan pie. For some reason, Karo syrup popped into my head, and thankfully, there was a recipe for pecan pie on the back of the Karo syrup container, so we were able to get everything we needed. I did, however, tell Penny that we were using a frozen pie crust. Love her though I do, I was not up for making a homemade crust!

Penny plunged in with both feet and took the lead in pie making. I more or less read directions and held the bowl so she could scoop in the filling. I agreed to try a bite of her pie and so did The Chief. And she had good reason to be proud of it—it came out beautifully, even for a pecan pie!

Penny said she really liked it, although it was very different from anything she’d ever eaten before. I’m happy to hear it, because she has a lot of pie to eat! The Chief and I ate our obligatory pieces of pie and we are done :-)

Penny also decided to help out making dinner yesterday. She informed me that she hates me because I always make such good food and she wants to eat all of it, the entire pan. Yesterday was no exception. We made stuffed shells from a recipe a neighbor gave me. Penny wanted to stuff the shells, as she had never seen jumbo shell pasta before and thought it was a lot of fun. Again, she does not want to use more of anything than she absolutely has to, so I had to tell her to put the entire jar of tomato sauce over the shells, but other than that, she did just fine. (what I was going to do with a quarter jar of tomato sauce, I don’t know!)

I told her that if nothing else, her training to be a housewife will be complete by the time she heads back to Thailand. She says she doesn’t mind learning to be a housewife, so either she really hates school or else I am just a shining example of what a glamorous profession it can be. Either way, I expect she will follow her dream of becoming a psychologist, but she will be an excellent caretaker of her future family either way.

Saturday, Penny had AFS orientation all day. She really enjoyed her time there. There was one other Thai student in attendance, and she was excited for the chance to meet her and also to see all the other students. Apparently, they are all in something of the same boat when it comes to their year so far—they all love their host families but are having a hard time making friends. They got the same advice from their AFS chapter leaders as they do from their host parents: give it time. But it’s hard to be patient. Penny said to me the other day, “I love to talk to my parents, but I want to talk to people my own age.”

To that end, we have encouraged her to list her real name on her Facebook page and to start posting in English, both of which she has done now. I explained that Facebook is an excellent tool for connecting with her peers but that they cannot connect with her if she is only writing in Thai. She said she gives people her name at school to add to their Facebook, but no one ever does. I told her that she should instead ask, “Would you write your name down for me, so I can look you up on Facebook and add you as my friend?” This lets her take an active role in pursuing friendships and finding people to add as friends, rather than sitting back and waiting for things to happen. She was invited in passing to the first home football game for her high school on Friday night this week, so I hope she pursues the invitation and tries to make a go of it. I think she will.

School continues to be an on-and-off struggle. She is in advanced placement English and they are reading Beowulf. Consequently, I am now reading Beowulf and badgering my father with questions about it when Penny and I both get stumped. I enjoy her history and government homework the most. The other day, she came home with an extra credit question to ask her parents who was president when they were a senior in high school and what they remembered about him. I’m sure I was in the minority when I answered the first George Bush, I would guess most of her classmates’ parents would have answered Reagan. And what I remembered was that he hated broccoli and he barfed on the prime minister of Japan (I also remember Dana Carvey’s parody of him saying “No new taxes” and whatnot, but there was limited space!). I hope I get to see her teacher’s comments on her worksheet about those responses after she gets her paper back!

The Chief and I got to spend a small amount of quality time with just Penny this weekend. Saturday, I sent Leah off to my friend Melissa’s for the day and night, which somewhat outraged Penny who didn’t really understand how we could need a break from the “little angel”. I explained that I am exhausted most of the time and that a little time away from us is good for Leah gaining some independence. She was not happy that her “best friend” was gone for the night, but it was fun for me and The Chief to be able to spend time with Penny Saturday evening and not worry about being interrupted or having to keep quiet while we were playing Yahtzee. (The fact that the Chief beat Penny twice in a row by only 3 points did not go down well with her!) It’s strange, but we really do have to divide our time between the two girls, so it’s nice to have time with each one of them individually. Friday, The Chief had taken off work for an appointment that fell through, so we took Leah down to the Children’s Museum of Richmond for the day and it was nice for the three of us to spend some quality time together as well, especially in safe place where Leah could go crazy and run around and make messes.

So here we are another week into our exchange. I hope to take Penny to the Virginia State Fair this week, but the weather is lousy, so I’m not sure we’ll be able to go. Fingers crossed, though! At the end of the week I will buy our plane tickets to Florida so that we are ready to roll to Disney World and my mom’s 60th birthday party at the end of October. It’s hard to imagine that it’s only 3 weeks from now that we’ll be heading down there!!! It’s hard to imagine that my mom is turning 60, that I’m 35, and that Leah is almost 18 months old. Sheesh! TIME FLIES!

Oh, and do you want to be a pie or flower customer? Drop me an email, private message on Facebook, or leave a comment here! :-D SHS Choir and Penny thank you!

Penny’s 18!!

2010-09-22T10:37:00.001-07:00

This Sunday was a big day in our household: it marked our Penny’s 18th birthday. She is now legally an adult—but don’t tell her that! :-D

We decided to throw a party for her to celebrate. She hadn’t met many people yet at school, but invited the kids she had met that she liked. We made up the difference inviting a bunch of our friends whom she had met and all of whom she liked. I have learned by now not to shop till the day of the party, but still, we had about 6 cancellations Sunday morning, and of course they all came after I ordered the pizzas! AUGH!

Penny had never had a big party in her honor before and she was powerfully excited about the whole thing. For her birthday, she is used to going to the Buddhist temple and giving food to the monks. We don’t have a Thai temple near here, so Penny’s parents and sister continued the tradition in Thailand in her honor while we celebrated here the American way.

The inspiration for Penny’s party came from our first shopping trip together when she arrived in the US. She went through the candy and chip aisles and happily proclaimed, “I love American junk food!” So we decided on that as our theme. When I was lamenting on Facebook that I didn’t know how to keep everyone happy and busy during a teen party, fellow AFS mom Nina suggested that we use her idea of a scavenger hunt. Her AFS son, Gianluca, had a birthday shortly after arriving from Italy, so Nina organized a scavenger hunt all over Seattle (read about his hunt here). I decided that sounded like an awesome idea, so she sent me her list and I amended it so it would work in Fredericksburg. The plan was in place, the invitations went out, and then we could settle down into the nitty gritty details of what else we needed.

Negotiations were intense over what to feed everyone, but finally we decided on pizza because it is a) pretty inexpensive to feed a crowd; b) sort of junk food; c) something most everyone loves; and d) didn’t require me to do anything other than call Papa John’s and have them deliver. On Football Sundays, Papa Johns offers free toppings and a bunch of other deals, so I ordered 6 pizzas and we were in business for meals! I went over to the store and picked up lots of chips and candy to make “The Candy Bar” and then Penny and I began discussing her birthday cake.

Penny loved the Carvel cake I had at my birthday party and said she wanted the same thing. Of course, I am no idiot, so I agreed to get her that, since I love it too. But then my buddy Amy Wells said she thought we should have a Hostess cake to go with the junk food theme. I didn’t know what a Hostess cake was, so she sent me a picture of a tiered cake covered in Hostess snack cakes. I was sold. I Googled for more pictures and came across a picture of a Rice Krispies Treats wedding cake, and that sold it. I would put the two together and we’d have a cake!

Penny’s birthday weekend got off to a great start. Saturday morning, we all went out onto the porch after breakfast to enjoy the beautiful sunny day. We found a box out there, and it was addressed to Penny! She kept saying “no, no!” like it wasn’t for her, but I showed her the label and got her a knife to cut the tape to find out what was inside. (One of the beauties of being from a foreign country is that you have no idea what FTD is, so it’s all a big surprise, despite the description being on the box.) She was blown away to find a big, beautiful bouquet of orange roses (one of her favorite colors is orange) waiting for her inside. We dug around for a card a little and found a note from Nana (my mom), and Penny was just thrilled. We called Nana right up and she got on the phone to say thank you. Leah was excited by the box and the wrappings, so it was a win-win!

Saturday evening, we returned from our neighbor’s 2-year-old’s birthday party, where Penny met a neighbor who is also in the senior class and they hit it off just great! I was so happy when Courtney even agreed to come to Penny’s party the next day. She floated home on a cloud so happy to have finally made a friend. Then we decided to get down to business on the cake. Penny hadn’t made RKT’s before, so it was kind of exciting to teach her a little something new. She loved them hot and gooey from the pan. I wish I had taken pictures, but by the time I thought about it, we were done. She did all aspects of the job, including smushing the treats into the cake pans, melting butter and marshmallows, adding the cereal, the whole thing. I kept feeling her arm muscles and telling her she was getting stronger and stronger. She said her arms were killing her—no doubt: the cake took 6 batches of treats to complete!

We set the pans aside till Sunday. Afterwards, we sat down to our regular game of Skip-Bo and I asked Penny to teach me to write “Happy Birthday” in Thai so I could put it on her Carvel cake. She happily agreed and then laughed her head off at my attempts, although there was one particular letter or symbol that she said I made much more nicely than she does. It was entertaining!!!

The next day dawned clear and bright. I was up at 4:30, unable to sleep, so I went out and decorated our driveway with Leah’s sidewalk chalk and then baked homemade scones for Penny’s birthday breakfast. Penny got a nice surprise when the phone rang at 9:00AM and it was her best friend in Thailand, who asked if they could call Penny specially for the occasion, to which we agreed. Then we popped the RKT’s out of the pan onto a platter and I was so happy at how great they looked. I could really see the thing as a wedding cake if you like RKT’s that much. It was cool! The treats popped out of the pan pretty easily, courtesy of how well I’d greased them, no doubt, and by really getting them densely packed into the pan, there was no doubt that we would have them crumbling or falling apart. It was great!

Around 11:30, my father arrived and Penny was just beside herself with excitement. She’d been dying to meet “PopPop” and ever since he announced he’d be visiting that weekend, she was just thrilled he’d make it for her birthday. She gave him a T-shirt as a gift, and he decided to wear it in honor of her birthday (the day I get my dad to wear a shirt with pink and purple decorations and gold glitter, well let’s just say “that’ll be the day!” and leave it at that, but Penny managed it after 5 minutes!), and then Michael decided to wear his, so I decided to wear mine for the first time too. We visited for a while and then it was getting to be party time, so we all put our shirts on and went outside to greet the first guests to arrive and get a picture of our family together in our Thai T’s.

At about 1:15, we detailed the rules of the scavenger hunt for everyone who had made it. There were 5 or 6 teenagers and a bunch of adults, so that was great—Penny was pleased with the turn out and so was I! They all broke into teams and headed out to complete their tasks. They had 3 hours to get everything done. Let me tell you, this is the way to have a party. Have everyone over and then get rid of them for 3 hours!!!! Plus, I didn’t have to cook anything, either! AWESOME! We decided to put the cake together while they were gone, and the spirit of the thing really captured my dad’s imagination. He even went out to get an extra box of Ring Dings so that it was done right. We were all tickled by the final result.

Then I wrote the Thai on the Carvel cake and screwed it up royally because I ran out of room and had to put the last letter on the cake border, but the same thing happened when I wrote on it in English, so what the heck!

Penny’s guests were super impressed that I’d even tried it, so I guess that’s all that matters.

Meanwhile, all the kids and adults participating in the hunt were having a blast. No one team completed every task, so we had to calculate all the points for each team and then declare a winner, but they all had a great time doing it and it broke the ice for many of the kids, as none of them knew each other. Here are some pictures from the hunt:

The top picture is Misty from the winning team, eating ketchup-covered fries without using her hands. The second picture shows Juliana at the Fredericksburg Visitor’s Center learning about our town. The third picture shows Penny’s entire team down on the city dock, with their team mummy, JB, who rides the bus with Penny. The final picture shows Melissa eating a banana split with one of Leah’s baby spoons. These were just some of the tasks, and every team did an amazing job sending back fun pictures that induced lots of laughs from our birthday girl.

After we calculated the points and handed out prizes (everyone got a prize ranging from DVD’s to Halloween flashlights to glow stick necklaces), Penny’s non-scavenging guests arrived and her AFS liaison, who had popped in for a few minutes, had to leave. As the hub-bub of the party started to kick in, the pizzas arrived and we all ate well. I also set out all the goodies on the Candy Bar and everyone was able to pick at that stuff. We had made Penny treat bags for the bar that read “Look out World! Penny’s 18!” and everyone was able to stuff lots of treats into the bags. Penny likes fruity candies more than chocolate candies, so we got the traditional things like peanut butter cups, Hershey miniatures, etc. and supplemented them with Starbursts, Skittles, Sour Patch Kids, and the like. There was definitely something for everyone.

After pizza, we had Penny open her gifts so that everyone’s meals could settle a bit. Penny got some really nice gifts, ranging from practical (gloves for the winter, photo albums), fun (gift cards to the movies and a game for the Wii), glitzy (bracelets), and even cash.

She was definitely touched by everyone’s generosity and excited about everything that she received.

Mike and I had decided to get her a charm bracelet. Exchange students acquire lots of “stuff” while on their exchange years, and we thought a charm bracelet would allow us to constantly add small charms to her bracelet and not give her a bunch of things to try and lug back to Thailand. Unfortunately, right after I started ordering charms, Penny told us that she had a charm bracelet already and didn’t much care for all that stuff on her wrist!! So I made a trip over to Things Remembered and asked for their advice. They had charm necklaces available, so I bought her one of those. I added a charm for the US and one for Virginia, as well as a K so she could always remember that she is a Kosior, a school house with the date of her first day of school engraved on the back, and a charm with a big 18 on it so she could commemorate her 18th birthday.

We still hope to give her charms throughout the year and I hope she likes it and wears it as a remembrance of her time here, which frankly, is just going by so darned quick!

After her gifts were opened, we got out the cakes, and of course, a wind kicked up just in time to light the candles!!!!!!!! I finally got them lit and we took a bunch of pictures. Penny held Leah tight as protection against all the attention we were lavishing on her, and we all sang to her and she happily accepted our good wishes before blowing out her candles.

She made quick work of cutting up the Carvel cake and serving everyone and we all picked at the Hostess cake. By then, the party was more or less over. Everyone started leaving, except my dad, Melissa, and Andy, so we all cleaned up the yard and then went inside for a Yahtzee contest. Yahtzee is one of three games we’ve taught Penny so far and she LOVES it. She was really excited to play against my dad, since he is the most down and dirty full contact yahtzee player the world has ever known. We played 2 rounds, and then put Leah to bed and Melissa and Andy left and we all just finished cleaning and relaxed.

It was special to share Penny’s big day with her, and she gave me a huge hug afterwards and said, “I love you!” Special moments, let me tell you, for all of us involved in this girl’s exchange year!!!

Another Week Down

2010-09-15T11:27:00.001-07:00

It has been a bit of a crazy week and a half. Can it really have been that long since Penny started school? UGH! The days are going by even quicker now that she is in her regular routine and Leah and I are back to our daily routine. Seriously, Leah now naps for hours, she gets so exhausted from our daily ventures to Toddlin’ Time and the library and the park. It’s pretty awesome.

Penny is doing fine. School is everything she was afraid it would be and also everything she hoped it would be all at once. She is having trouble with her creative writing class, and was going in today to see if she could drop it and add a different class instead. Since this year is not going to count for her, I really didn’t care what she did.

She is experiencing some challenges understanding spoken English. She does just fine expressing herself verbally and in writing, but reading takes her forever as she attempts to translate each word and then form some sort of sense of it, and oral communication is tough. She doesn’t always understand her teachers, and she is afraid to ask questions in class because she does not want the other kids to think she is stupid.

Penny has met a few new friends. I thought for a while that she was only talking to other exchange students at school, but in fact, when we sat down last night to make a list of who is coming to her birthday party on Sunday, she said, “Did you remember Brianna?” I said, “Who the heck is Brianna?” and she said, “The girl from my marketing class.” I said, “Is she coming?” and got “OH YES!” and a big grin in return. I was so excited, I thought I’d fall off my chair. Then she said, “Did you remember the Korean girl?” I said, “The Korean girl is coming too!?” “OH YES!” and an even bigger grin. I”m so happy some teens are going to be here. I invited all our regular adult friends, but it’s good for Penny to have friends her own age.

This week has been busy. Monday was my book club meeting, which was the first time I went out and left Penny, The Chief, and Leah alone together without my influence. I only received 3 text messages, so that wasn’t too bad. Of course, I cooked them dinner before I left, so all they really had to do was get Leah to bed, Penny to do her homework, and The Chief to work on a job application. Unfortunately, Penny wasn’t feeling well, so she took yesterday off. I dragged her to the doctor, despite protestations—if you’re sick enough to stay home, you’re sick enough to go to the doctor! Regardless, I was worried that she had had a headache for 2 days, plus the school requires a doctor’s note attached to all absences. So she was diagnosed with migraines and given a prescription. She says these happen to her frequently in Thailand. I think she just let herself get way to stressed out about school and it caused the migraine to come on very suddenly. Having a day off to think about everything hopefully gave her some perspective. She spent almost the entire day up in her room in bed studying and sleeping, and we got to navigate the AFS health plan, which was fun.

Yesterday I babysat for my neighbor while she went to the doctor, so I kept Leah and Daniel out of the house while Penny rested. Last night she asked to go to the King’s Buffet here in town, which I think is her favorite restaurant. :-) She ate well and went back to school this morning. Leah and I went and picked up supplies for Penny’s big birthday bash and then went to storytime and lunch at the mall with Leah’s little peeps. She is now resting and I’ve gotten the house decluttered, so I’m taking a break. Tomorrow will be heavy duty cleaning—vacuuming (ugh!), mopping (double ugh!), dusting, laundry (triple ugh!), etc. Friday we will probably kick it into high gear with party preparations after Leah submits to what I can only imagine will be a heck of a nap after a 2 hour playschool session (her Tuesday session was cancelled, so she gets to make it up on Friday, plus go to her bonus class). Saturday, we have Daniel’s 2nd birthday party and Sunday is Penny’s party, plus my dad is coming for the occasion. Penny is literally beside herself that my dad is coming to her birthday party. She cannot wait to meet him. I’m kind of excited he’ll be here as well :-D Of course, I will post lots of pictures of the party and fun after it’s over and I’ve recovered! We are presently expecting about 25 people.

So that’s all for now. Hope everyone else is doing great with their kids and month #2!!!

Schools

2010-09-08T09:08:00.001-07:00

Penny started school yesterday at Stafford High School. We took some pictures before she left to start the day, my favorite of which was of her and her favorite host father, The Chief:

She was really nervous, but she admitted she was very excited too. After I walked her up the hill to the bus stop, I came back to the house and got Michael and Leah in the car to go to the train station so Michael could get to work. As we went down the hill, we saw Penny’s bus just going up and around, so we decided to follow it and take a picture of her getting on the bus. I was slightly overwhelmed at the bravery she displayed in getting on the bus and going off to a new school in a new country surrounded by new people and trying to learn in a new language. So yeah, I cried. She is an extraordinary young woman.

I spent the day keeping us busy so I wouldn’t have time to sit around and fret about how she was doing. Leah and I walk with our neighbor every morning and afterwards, I took Leah over to a local place called Toddlin’ Time for her first “class”, which I guess she enjoyed. She was more interested in tearing the place apart than in playing games and singing songs with the other 17 month olds there. (Yes, my baby is 17 months old today!!! YIKES!!!) Afterwards, we went to the park for lunch with Cindy and Wendy, and on the way home, Leah passed out and I used the time partly to relax and partly to clean up some of the house. Leah got up around 2:30 and we only had 45 minutes to wait until Penny got home, so I decided to let Leah play outside with her buckets of water.

I heard the bus arrive up at the top of the street and figured that Penny would be home in a couple minutes, but I turned around to see her flying down the hill, cutting across the neighbors’ lawn, heading straight for us. She hurled herself into the lawn chair next to me and heaved such a sigh!!! I thought, “Uh oh! This can’t be good!” But in fact, she said it wasn’t awful. :-D

She met several people in her classes. She has no idea of their names. We talked a bit later about how to continue a conversation with someone and hopefully today she will put that into action. Penny’s 18th birthday is coming up soon and so we’ve decided to use that as an “excuse” to meet new people. We started making a list of people she could invite already and none of them have names. They are people like “The boy across the corner” and “The Ukrainian girl who sits behind me” and “The girl who liked my drawing”.

I had decided to pull out an old trick of my mom’s and I tucked a greeting card into Penny’s lunch bag so she would have a sweet surprise waiting for her at lunch time. She said when she got it, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she did both. The front of the card read “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone”. She felt it was a message she needed to hear and it helped her through her afternoon. So, thanks, Mom! Penny was happy to read our message and know we were thinking of her.

Last night, I helped her with her government homework. We learned about constitutional law and the geography of the US. She is a good student and prefers to work things out for herself rather than be told answers (she had to fill in the states’ names on a map of the US and decided to read an atlas instead of having me tell her the names of the states).

Afterwards, she, Mike, and I had a lengthy chat about everything while sitting around the kitchen table. It was one of the best chats we’ve had since she got here and just made me realize all over again how fortunate we are to have Penny spending her year with us. It is great fun to hear all her hopes and dreams and plans, and what she thinks of school here and how it already differs from school in Thailand. My friend, Donna, asked me to find out about the differences in the schools and post them to the blog, so I asked Penny a lot of questions last night. Here’s what I learned:

In Thailand, Penny is at school from 8:00-4:30. She wears a uniform identical to the other kids (girls wear skirts, boys wear pants). She sits in one classroom all day and the teachers come to her to teach each subject. There are no lockers, everything fits in her desk. She takes 8 classes per day. She gets a 30 minute break after her first 2 classes. After 2 more classes, she gets 1 hour for lunch. Then she has 2 more classes and another 30 minute break before her final 2 classes. The students are not allowed to have food or drink in the classroom. They must sit in the same seats every day. Everyone takes the same classes, they cannot choose which classes they want to take.

The Thai school year starts in May and runs until September. Then the students have the month of October and half of November free. Mid-November, they start back up and go to school until March 1, 2, or 3, depending on the calendar. Then they have off again until May.

At her school here, Penny has 8 classes, but only attends 4 classes per day. The schedule runs on an X, Y schedule, so on X days she has one set of 4 classes, each lasting 90 minutes, on Y days, she has the other 4. She has no breaks other than 5 minutes between each class to get to her next class. She has a locker. She may wear whatever she wants. She has observed other students eating and drinking in class. She may sit wherever she wants from one day to the next unless the teacher assigns seating. She has only a 20 minute lunch break. She had the freedom to select different electives for her class. She sees a sea of different faces at each class, potentially making it harder to get to know people as she may connect with someone who shares only 1 class with her, and will not see them again for 2 days. She noted that each ethnic group in the high school tends to stick together—all the Asian students in one spot, all the black students in another, all the Hispanic students over here, all the white students over there. She was surprised by this, but she also admitted to actively seeking out other kids who were Asian to start with. I don’t think there is a whole lot of ethnic diversity in Thailand, but when you hear of America as the great “melting pot”, you probably expect to see more intermingling. It makes me pause and consider what Leah’s future holds.

It has been a bit of a shock to her system, I think, but overall, she has handled it incredibly well. I’m excited to see what her “second first day” is, as today is the Y day in her schedule and she has both math and science on her Y days. We have told her that we want her to participate in at least one club or activity this year, so she is pondering that one over. I think it will give her a good opportunity to meet people in a fixed environment, so I hope she chooses well and gets things going. She is interested in the drama club. We’ll see!!! We collectively decided that we would not participate in the Parent, Student, Teacher Association, so that one is out :0) We’re leaving it up to her!

So that’s the latest from Penny’s participation in the educational system. Tonight I’ll make up invitations to her birthday party for her to hand out when she meets interesting people. Otherwise, she’ll just keep trucking. We know she will meet people in time, and getting used to all the changes in the school day is a big challenge. She’s doing great. We are proud!

Introduction to School

2010-08-31T19:11:00.001-07:00

Today was Stafford High’s New Upperclassmen Orientation and then its school-wide open house. I decided to take Penny to both, as I felt it would be great if she could meet other kids entering upper grades who were in the same boat she was.

On the way over, I told Penny that her goal for the time at school was to talk to 5 new people. She thought I was crazy. I knew she would meet at least 3, as I had contacted an acquaintance in town whose daughter is in 12th grade and whose son is starting at the high school this year in 9th grade. The other 2 AFS students in town were also going to be there, one of whom she had met and one of whom she had not met. I met both of them and was impressed by both girls. One is from Norway and the other Finland, but they seemed pleased to see Penny. Penny is going to be in 12th grade and the other two will be in 11th grade, so they will not share many (or any) classes, but my friend’s daughter may share a couple of classes with Penny, so I’m glad we were able to connect and she can look for a friendly face.

The orientation was sponsored by the school’s Link Club, and had many student ambassadors who were on hand to greet new students. They played a bunch of silly games that forced them to interact with each other, doing things like “Tell the other person what you did today from the time you woke up till now in 30 seconds”. I’m sure that got lost in translation and all the fast talking went right over Penny’s head, but she did a good job of singing and playing the silly games. I lost track of what they were doing after that, as a couple of the teachers took us parents on a tour of the building. The high school is huge. Seriously, my entire school that I attended from K-12 would fit in one wing of that place. When we got back from the tour, I felt as if I had no idea where we had been or where we were going. I almost sat down and cried!

Shortly afterwards, Penny arrived back from her tour and she was given a phone number from one of the student ambassadors. Now she has someone she can call any time she needs help. They served the kids pizza and then the open house began. We looked at Penny’s schedule and decided to divide it by floor and by wing. I explained to her that all the classrooms starting with a 1 were on the first floor and all the rooms starting with a 2 were on the second floor, and then we started with the first floor rooms. We met her government teacher first, a very nice man. I had letters from AFS that I gave to each teacher, which they were happy to receive. Mr. Miller told Penny about the text books and the supply list that he wanted her to have. We progressed very similarly from classroom to classroom, and the teachers along the way helped us when we got lost. Every single one of her teachers had a connection to Thailand somehow. Her English teacher had a sister who was an exchange student to Bangkok. The creative writing teacher had a previous student from Thailand. The history teacher had worked with a bunch of Thais, and knew a bunch of curse words. He said one of them and Penny blushed and burst out laughing. It was hilarious.

Eventually we got done and went back to the cafeteria to buy Penny a school t-shirt. We got information on the athletics pass so she can decide if she wants to buy one for cheaper than it would cost her to go to the games and pay for them individually.

On the way home, we were both just exhausted. I hate crowds, and the school was CROWDED like crazy. Penny was overwhelmed by the language and fast talking and trying to find her way around and all the interaction and information. She handled it like an absolute champion, and I am extremely proud of her. All the teachers were great and told her to let them know if she doesn’t understand, they will be happy to chat with her after class or whatever she needs. One offered to give her extra notes so she doesn’t have to look up and down at the white board while he is talking…

As we were driving home, Penny said she wanted to get home to her best friend Leah :) She asked if she could stay home with us now and not go to school, and I told her that I was pretty sure she’d be bored and all she was going to learn from me was that she does not want to be a housewife. She replied, “I want to be a housewife! You go to school and I will be a housewife!” I was actually a bit envious, listening to some of her teachers today, about all the great things she’s going to learn. I promised to help her with her reading at least ;-D Since she hates reading and I love it…

I think she is going to have a great year. I hope she will put herself out there and really make friends and have a blast. She took the first step, which is the hardest. I told her that this is her destiny, and as scared as she may be, she should embrace it with two arms, since it won’t come her way again. Here’s hoping!

A Baking Lesson

2010-08-29T18:43:00.001-07:00

This past Friday, we didn’t have a whole lot to do, so I decided to give Penny her first baking lesson. Penny calls me “Cookies”, a nickname my husband gave me years ago. It came about when I bought him one of those giant chocolate chip cookies when we were dating. Before Penny arrived, we were chatting on Messenger and she gave me quite the interview about what kind of cookies I like. (I decided finally that Hershey Kiss cookies are my favorite). Before she left, Penny’s mom Linda told her that she should learn some baking techniques from me so that when she goes back to Thailand, she can make them some treats.

I went through the cupboards and found that I had enough ingredients to make Chunky Chocolate Jam Bars, a real favorite in this house (probably my second favorite cookie!). I decided that bar cookies would be easy, since the bake pretty uniformly and it would be fun. Penny was excited about it, so we agreed to meet in the kitchen during Leah’s nap time! This is the recipe we followed, making only the slight change that instead of using raspberry jam, we used the strawberry jam I canned earlier this year after spending way too much time in the Pick Your Own fields at Westmoreland Berry Farm.

Penny is a very precise chef, so consequently, the cookies came out very well. One thing we are learning about her is that she hates to waste anything. And she only uses exactly what she needs to use. When she cooked dinner for us the other night, she made exactly one chicken breast for 3 people. Needless to say, The Chief and I were rooting around afterwards trying to find a little something else. :-D She was also scandalized when I asked her to dump out a half a container of milk that had gotten old and gone bad. She agreed it smelled funny and the color was not good, but she was very upset we couldn’t do something with it. I have a few items in the fridge that she’s been hanging on to and when school starts next week, I am cleaning house. I just don’t want to upset her in the process!

Anyway, she was extremely deliberate while measuring out the ingredients. After she’d measured out exactly 1 1/2 cups of oatmeal, there was about a tablespoon of oatmeal left in the container, and she wanted to put it away. I told her it wouldn’t hurt anything if she tossed it in with the rest of the cookies, so that’s what we did. We had to decide what went against the grain more—using more than she needed or tossing a tablespoon of something in the trash. We erred on the side of utilitarianism.

Teaching Penny some baking was very useful. She got to try out using my stand mixer, and we got to have a lot of dialogue using numbers and fractions and food items that we might not have discussed otherwise. We got to talk about foods she likes and dislikes and things that her mother likes and dislikes and The Chief and I like and dislike as well. Unfortunately, I forgot that Penny does not like oatmeal, a key component in these cookies, but oh well!

Penny got warm with the oven on, something that is quite rare. Usually she is wearing a sweatshirt and long pants to counteract the effects of the air conditioner. Here she is, having stripped off one layer of clothing to reveal her much beloved “Child of the 80’s” t-shirt. The shirt cracks me up in that Penny was born in the early 90’s for a start, and it has a Bob Ross “button” which says something about setting fire to the happy little trees, a decidedly un-Bob-Ross-like sentiment. Given that she does not seem to know what her t-shirts say and that it just seems to be cool to wear English sayings on things, I would gather this is one of the “coolest” things in her wardrobe. And I happen to love it as well! Oh yes, the above picture is of her measuring out coconut. I’m forgetting the point of this post!

The sole point of miscommunication we had while baking was in getting the bottom crust ready. I told Penny to eyeball about half the mixture into the pan. She thought I wanted her to use 1/2 a cup of the mixture and press it into 1/2 the pan. But we worked through that and she made a beautiful crust. Here she is preparing to spread the jam over it. (Baker’s hint: if you decide to make the recipe yourself, I always spread the jam on the crust and then top it with chocolate chips, instead of sprinkling broken chocolate bar over the crust and then attempting to cover that mess with jam. The cookies come out just fine and are way easier to make!)

Here is a picture of Penny’s finished product:

Let me tell you, people, she was not happy to learn we had to wait for them to cool off before we cut into them. We wound up putting them up on a baking rack so they would cool off faster, but after about 30 minutes, the wait was unbearable. Leah was awake, so I brought her downstairs and then we cut into them.

This is not a great picture on account of the fact that somehow a fingerprint got on my lens. I’ll give you one guess how it got there. Was Penny proud?

You betcha!!! What did Leah think?

“Thanks anyway, but I’d rather eat some dried cherries.”

Later that night, we fed some to The Chief, who pronounced them an overwhelming success.

In October, we’ll be making some delicious pumpkin cookies and in December at the holidays, I always go a bit cookie crazy! So Penny’s culinary education will continue. I have my doubts that anything will quite add up to Texas Toast in her book, but we will see! Cooking with my “daughter” is everything I dreamed it could be!

A Tour of DC

2010-08-27T20:25:00.001-07:00

Recently in reading other families’ and students’ blogs, I’ve been kinda bummed about the fact that I don’t have cool pictures of us running on windswept beaches, enjoying the natural beauty of deserts or pristine forests, or of Penny surrounded by hordes of adoring fellow teens. She is gamely following along with whatever game plan I come up with, which frankly most of the time is the spur of the moment, but I felt like I needed to do more somehow, because although 3 weeks is a long time for her to be here before school starts, it is slipping away, and I knew I would look back and think, “I wish I had done X, Y, and Z” those first weeks.

So yesterday I got up and we were sitting around and I told Penny to prepare herself for a little trip that evening. I am famous for my trips around the DC monuments at night, and I decided we needed pictures of Penny in front of imposing memorials and breath-taking fountains, with her unhip host mom if nothing else! :-D

We left home around 8:30 last night and got to DC around 9:15. Driving around in the dark, I got slightly lost and we wound up on the opposite side of the Capitol as I intended us to be. However, we were actually on the front, I think, so it worked out well. As we pulled up, I thought she would be blown away by the nearly supernatural glow of the white dome of the Capitol in the DC darkness, but instead, she was giddily squealing over our proximity to the Library of Congress. I was thinking, “Really?” and she begged me to pull over so she could take a picture. I couldn’t stop where we were, so I pulled around the corner and we were lucky to find a parking space literally right in front of the Capitol and right next to the LOC. We got out and I had to fairly sprint to keep up with her as she exclaimed how excited she was to see it. I said, “The Library of Congress?!” and she said, “Yes! You ever see the movie The Day After Tomorrow?” I guess it is prominently featured, I haven’t seen it!

Shockingly (to me anyway), Penny had no idea what the Capitol Building was. I explained that it’s the seat of American government where the senators and representatives meet to set policy and make laws, blah blah blah, and then I realized that I wouldn’t recognize whatever the most famous government building in Bangkok was if I fell over it. So I guess we’re even on that score! To her credit, Penny was impressed by the building as judged by the number of “Oh!”’s and “Very nice!”’s she uttered while wandering around in front of the building. Her primary concern however, was getting pictures and in the dark, neither of our cameras was doing a good job! UGH!

This was as good as it got!!!

We went over to the other side of the street and got a picture of what I guess is the Supreme Court building, but honestly, I have no idea, it was late, we didn’t see signs, and I took a guess. It looked like the Supreme Court to me. Then we hopped back in the car and drove to the other side of the Capitol to try and get more pictures, but none of those came out either, so we gave up and made our way to the Mall.

Our first stop was the World War II Memorial, one of my two favorite places in Washington DC. On the way we saw The White House and drove past the Washington Monument. Penny is afraid of heights but feels confident that she will someday before she leaves go to the top of the monument anyway. We walked all over the WWII Memorial and Penny snapped a zillion pictures.

Penny, a proud new Virginian!

A self-portrait in the lights of the Memorial

Penny poses like this last picture constantly. Recently, a host mom posted a blog called "Sign Language" on her blog about what different hand signs mean in different countries. So I decided to ask Penny if she knew what this two fingered salute meant in the US and if it meant something in Thailand. She said in Thailand, it just means, “Don’t I look cute?” I explained in the US it means “Peace” in a kind of hippie context. She didn’t much care about that. Haha!

After that, I told her we would walk to the Lincoln Memorial. It is a bit of a hike, but she is young and skinny and I am old and fat, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem for her. Of course, this is the kid who asked me how she was going to get to the bus stop, which is at the top of the street, exactly 2 houses from here, and when I suggested she was going to walk, her eyes got as big as saucers and she said, “Oooooh!” But there’s really nowhere to park near the Lincoln Memorial any more, even for those of us cool enough to sport handicapped tags, so walk we must! We walked along a semi-lighted pathway, which was lined with Porta-Potties for the upcoming tea party rally this weekend. As we finally got close to the Lincoln Memorial, we saw all the pavilions up for Glenn-Beck-A-Thon 2010, and Penny made the mistake of asking, “This is for some kind of rally?” Only on account of the fact that Asians really do switch their R’s and L’s when they speak, I had to ponder for a second what she meant by “This is for some kind of Larry?” But I realized what she meant and then it popped into my head what was going on, and so I said that it was and she was interested to know more. Without putting too fine a point on it, I think Glenn Beck is a gas bag, so I attempted to indicate my feelings about the whole thing without being disrespectful in case Penny is quite conservative, which I doubt that she is really anything based on the conversations we’ve had about politics thus far (when we picked her up, she was wearing a shirt that read “Political Minded”. I asked her if that was true and she asked me what it meant. I explained and she said, “Oh no, I just like this shirt.”). The whole thing seemed a little over her head, which was fine with me and if you want to know what I told her it was, you’ll have to look on my Facebook album in the comments section :-D And don’t say you weren’t warned if you happen to be a great lover of the tea parties and Fox News.

Anyway, as we were walking up to the Memorial, which was drawing Penny in like a moth to the flame, two men stopped us and asked if we’d like our picture taken together. Of course! They snapped two for sure, and we were just thrilled to have a mother-daughter shot on our big night out.

Penny announced that she wanted to climb the steps, not take the wimpy elevator up to the top, and I am proud to say I made it! Once we got inside, she was so impressed by the statue of Abraham Lincoln. We had tried showing her the battlefields in Fredericksburg and explaining the Civil War, but let’s face it people, if you were 17 and not an American, would you be all that interested in an internal conflict that went down 150 years ago? So we are educating her little by little about American history, but since she is about to take both US history AND government in school, she will come out well educated. Heck, I might even read the books just for fun. It’s been a while!

We left the Memorial and I took her to the Korean War Veterans Memorial which I think freaked her out a little bit and then the Vietnam Wall. She was starting to fade out a bit (by now it was well past 11), but she did gamely cross the little bridge onto Independence Island and then we finally made it back to the WWII. She was starting to sniffle and shuffle and I asked her if she was OK and did she have it in her to have one more visit to my ultimate favorite spot in DC? She said, “No” but she said it laughingly, and I really didn’t know what to make of her response. She said, “I cannot walk in a straight line. How far is it?” So I told her it was across the park and we would drive there. She didn’t disagree, so I went for it.

Once we got there, though, I realized I had pushed her a bit too far. Disappointingly, none of the fountains was turned on, so it was a bunch of rocks and statues in near darkness. I took her down to the Tidal Basin to see the city, and she walked through the memorial, but her heart was not in it. Oddly, though, on the way back, she perked right up and wanted to take pictures with all the statues!

She was interested to know who Eleanor Roosevelt was although she didn’t care too much about who FDR was. I got her back to the car, and almost immediately, she was out cold. She perked up when I put the radio on and Katy Perry came out of the speakers, but other than that, she was the kind of tired when your head flops forward and scares you, but you just keep putting your head back and sleeping anyway. We got home at about 12:45AM, and I think she was asleep before she hit the top of the stairs. I, on the other hand, had to pack lunch for the mister and check in on the wee one before bed. I may be old, but apparently, I’ve still got boundless energy! ;-D Penny did make me promise that I would take her back to DC this week, particularly to take pictures of the LOC, so we are hoping to get up there on Wednesday.

Taking Penny around DC was a special time for me. Not only did I get to see the delight in her eyes as she took in our beautiful and historic landmarks, but I realized in walking around and thinking about my feelings about what was going on around me (the rally, people stopping to ask me for directions, watching other people enjoy the sights, strangers saying “good evening!” [which Penny finds hilarious, by the way]), that I am really proud of my country and to be living here. I disagree with a lot of crap going on this country right now and I have a lot of issues with the way it’s being run and the way it has been run, but I don’t live in fear of saying so, and we enjoy great freedoms. It is truly a beautiful place to live and visit and I look forward to loving our country even more as I travel with Penny this year!

Another Week Nearly Gone?

2010-08-25T20:17:00.001-07:00

It has been almost a week since I blogged and another week has gone by. I can’t believe it. The first week was very slow. We were all getting used to each other and feeling each other out. This week has been more fun. Of course, we had a teenager issue to deal with, but I think we worked it out well and unless I see signs that things are still happening that we haven’t agreed to, I think Penny has learned we’re not as clueless as we appear to be! Parenting is definitely not for whimps!

Penny has cooked for us twice now, two different Thai curries. One she made for my birthday party. It was a good bit spicy to us, but she didn’t mind it at all. Tonight’s curry was milder. She took some down to the neighbor afterwards, so I hope they enjoyed it as well. She has a very generous heart and seems to like all of my adult friends, so I hope that she will find kids she enjoys and I’m sure she will be just as generous to them.

This week she got to experience the Fredericksburg Pub. She loved it there and thought the physical building was just beautiful. I was totally bummed that they don’t do trivia any more! But we had a nice meal with friends anyway. I also took her out to the Westmoreland Berry Farm today. I thought it would be nice for her to see a quieter part of Virginia. She found it “beautiful” and “peaceful”.

She continues to eat well. We go through literally pounds of grapes every week. I bought a bag on Sunday and it was gone by Sunday night. It cracks me up. She also buys a couple of bags of Pepperidge Farm cookies each week. This week she is sampling Milanos.

Her English is steadily improving. She brought an electronic dictionary with her, but it has not been working and we have been unable to make it hold a charge. Our neighbor who is an electrician is coming over tomorrow to have a look at it, and if he can’t fix it, we will go to a local bookstore and get a paper dictionary, which Penny’s mother told her to bring in the first place. That cracks me up—I never used to listen to my mom either.

We have cute miscommunications in addition to the ones that are obvious. Penny has a bout of sneezes every single morning, and as is the custom, I say “Bless you!” after every sneeze. I asked her, “What do you say in Thailand when someone sneezes?” Her response was “Achoo!” That just cracks me up.

Penny and I have been burning up the Wii playing Super Mario Brothers. We also have learned Phase 10, as I mentioned, and tonight I taught her Skip Bo. She loves Yahtzee and the C, L, R dice that you play with candy. She is a bit of a fiend and a card shark, so I have to keep a tight eye on her, but her glee is unmistakable when she wins.

I am making a list of movies she needs to see while she is here. She has never seen Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, Forrest Gump, and The Princess Bride. We started watching the first season of Lost. She says she does not want to watch it at night any more! But then she says she does not want anyone to know that because she wants to be thought of as brave! :-)

Appearances are a lot to Penny. Today she asked me if I think she sleeps too late. I said that I thought she was fine and she could sleep later if she wants to, but she said she is afraid it will be bad manners. I pointed out that I take a nap in the afternoons and that could be considered bad manners, which she vehemently disagreed with, so we agreed she can sleep however late she wants until school starts. I suspect that she will still get up between 8 and 9 just in case. She is also worried about what kind of friends to make and asked what kind of friends we want her to make. We just told her to trust her own judgment. I hope that she will start to form friendships when we go to the new student mixer, but I suspect she is like me in making friends slowly and deliberately. We’ll see!

This weekend coming up, Penny will have her first meeting with the AFS liaison. We will go bowling with friends on Friday. Next week will also be busy with an open house at school, my physical therapy appointments, a game group at the local library, and hopefully a trip to DC. I want to show her DC by Night, as I think the monuments and sites are impressive as hell at night. I need to convince her to stay up late. :-D

Fun and Games

2010-08-20T20:34:00.001-07:00

Penny has been here officially one week now. When you stop to think that she will be here 10 months, or roughly 40 weeks, one week going by is significant. I’m not counting in a bad way, mind you, it’s just that I’m aware that very soon the time is going to fly by and we will think, “Where did the year go!?” It has been an interesting week. I had visions of what I thought would happen, and none of that has occurred, and we are just fine with that.

We had Penny’s first real bout of homesickness on Wednesday. Of course, I wanted it to go away immediately, but it was something that had to run its course. We sat together on the couch and she cried for about 3 minutes. I hugged her, and it was over. Just like that. She seems fine again.

Thursday, we had Victoria over again to babysit while I was at physical therapy. They had a nice time together, but I think they are both a bit on the quiet side, so it was more or less that she just went home and that was that. I hope Penny can find people she can talk to or listen to while they do all the talking. I suspect in that regard she is a lot like me! :-) I’m more of a listener. Two listeners together makes for a very quiet household.

After my PT, we went over and met Cindy and Wendy and the kids for a late-morning bowl. Penny assured me she was a horrible bowler, but I came in dead last behind her, a 7-year-old, and a 9-year old. She had a good laugh over that one. Afterwards, our little crew went over to the Massaponnax Chick-Fil-A for lunch. There is a woman who works there named Deborah whom we all adore. She is so cheerful and friendly and helpful and always buzzing around getting us drinks and whatnot. Last week we went to CFA several times hoping that we would be able to see her there, but she wasn’t there. We all got nervous that she had quit, but in fact, she was just on vacation. So I snapped a picture of her with Penny.

Thursday evening, we did go to the youth group at my friend’s church. The girls who attended were all much younger than Penny, one of the leaders was sick, and the girls were all in and out and roving between different activities, so it wasn’t much that allowed Penny to get actively involved in forming friendships. We stayed for about an hour and a half, and played cards with several people, which was pretty cool, as now I know we can play cards together. In fact, I went out today and got Phase 10, as that’s what we played at the youth group and tonight Penny and I played it and had a great time. We even tied at the end (didn’t keep score, just decided to see who could get through all 10 phases first and we got through them at the same time!). Penny likes to play Uno, and fortunately we have Braille Uno cards, so Mike will be able to play with us at some point.

Today, I went walking with my neighbor as I do every morning, and then Lisa and Daniel came in for about an hour and we played with the kiddos. Leah fell asleep immediately afterwards and then I went and picked Mike up early from work for an appointment. When we got back, Leah was still sleeping, so we grabbed some McD’s and fed Penny. I went to lay down for a few minutes, but Leah immediately woke up! So we fed Leah and then I decided to take Penny for her first trip to Target. She had asked me earlier in the week if Walmart was the most famous department store in the US, and I explained that it was one of the most famous stores, but that Target was just as famous. While they have Walmart in Thailand, they don’t have Target, and Penny’s friends had all advised her to shop at Walmart. I wanted her to at least have been in a Target, so today was the day. We drove over and gave Mike some quiet time in the house. We walked all over the Target, which turned out to be great since they have gas grills on clearance, and I am sorry to say that ours has died, so I was able to find one I really liked. We picked up a few items—Penny got a notebook for her first two days of school (we will go buy her school supplies after she gets her syllabi on the first day) and some snacks, and I got some glasses (all ours seem to have broken) and the card game, juice, and ketchup. Plus I had plied Leah with fruit snacks to keep her quiet during the trip around the store, so I had to pay for those!

On the way out, we hit Starbucks, but that was lost in translation as to exactly what Penny wanted. She wound up with an iced latte, but in fact wanted a coffee frappucino. So now we know for next time. She found the latte bitter, so I tried mixing in some sugar, which helped a bit, but it was definitely not what she wanted. We talked about other options and together figured it out for next time.

When we got home, we hung out for a while. I have some family issues going on at the moment and wanted to talk to Mike, but that didn’t really happen. Leah was dancing around and Penny was chasing her and we were busy with two active kids!! So finally, I tried to think of what we could do to keep busy, and decided we were going to go to Chuck E. Cheese. I asked Penny if she liked arcade games and she said she didn’t know, so I tried explaining skee ball and she said she thought it was OK, which was close enough to good. :) So we trooped over there and got a pizza and token combo and spent 2 1/2 hours there. Leah was terrified of the rides in the toddler room and consequently wouldn’t leave my side much, so I didn’t do much playing, but Mike and Penny played a lot of skee ball, Penny is a champion basketball player, and we all played some video games. We left with a bunch of tickets and still a good number of tokens for our next trip.

(see where the basketball thing says “Wow! Wow!”? Yeah, she was awesome.)

We got home and I put Leah to bed and Penny and I played a round of Phase 10 and then decided to watch a movie. We agreed on The Holiday, which is one of my favorites and we watched it with the subtitles going, which allowed Penny to write down words she didn’t know and we talked about some of them. I was not exactly thrilled to explain “Holy shit!” Hahaha I told her not to use that one. And also “ass” I think was in there. She’s been advised not to say that either!

So Week One is done. It has been filled with moments in which nothing has happened and we’ve sat and stared at each other without much to say and also with moments that have been jam packed with laughter and chatter and fun. Tomorrow Penny will prepare Thai food to bring to my birthday party, which is tomorrow as well. Sunday we haven’t got any plans. We talked about going to New England next week, but I have PT and a hair cut scheduled on Thursday, Mike has a blind guy appointment on Friday, I have an open house for a toddler class on the following Monday, and Penny has school open house on Tuesday. So the timing doesn’t work out. I’d like to take her somewhere to do something, but I need to work it out. We’ll see.

The big challenge for me has been dividing my time between my two girls. Unexpectedly, Leah has a big problem with me sharing my time with someone else, and of course, Penny needs my time and attention while she gets settled into a new home and new country and new routine. Even if we are all in the same room together, I feel as if I’m trying to perfect a wild and crazy juggling act. I think it is working out fine, and I hope I am meeting the needs of them both! Then I need to think of my husband, and of myself. Tonight I’m taking time after what has been an extremely bad day personally to decompress for a while. Everyone else is upstairs, and it’s 11:30PM, but I want a few minutes to get rid of this headache and try to shake the emotions I’ve got going on. It makes me think about other moms and how you handle getting on with your day for the sake of your family when you really just want to curl up into a ball and hide for a couple of days? Ahhh, stress, my old friend! How I haven’t missed you in over a year! :-D

Registering for School

2010-08-18T11:08:00.001-07:00

Today we had Penny’s school registration appointment. It was a time for her to go and meet her new guidance counselor and to select classes. It was a pretty straightforward procedure. They had a basic schedule set up for her, but it turns out where school is concerned, Penny was actually quite happy to voice her opinions! She did not want to take art or computer classes, no thank you. So she switched into creative writing and marketing. Now she is pondering switching from marketing to drama, her thinking being she needs to talk more. So we are going to encourage her to join the drama club, as she wants to be in business someday and a marketing class might be more valuable than a drama class.

AFS Virginia gave us a letter to print out for each teacher, so those are now ready since we know her teachers’ names. There is an open house at the school on August 31, and just before it is a mixer for new students entering grades 10-12. I will take her to both so we can try to learn our way around the school and she can meet a few people. She has acquiesced on attending the youth group tomorrow night, so that is good!

That’s the latest and greatest!

Keeping Lines of Communication Open

2010-08-17T11:17:00.001-07:00

I have been brainstorming ideas to keep Penny busy while she settles in here and starts to meet people. She is very shy of trying to meet new friends, so we are going slowly in that arena, and I understand her misgivings, I would feel the same! She says Americans talk very fast and she does not understand us half the time. So we are trying to slow down as much as we can and not talk over each other, which I suddenly am aware of us doing.

Today, I decided we would go to the pool. Our neighbor, Lisa, is a member of a local pool and she gets us guest passes to use. So I called her and asked if we could go today and we decided to have a picnic lunch and go use the pool. I got Leah ready and Penny said she was ready too, but that she was not going swimming. I said, “you aren’t!?” kind of surprised and she said, “No, it is too hot.”

This did not make any sense to me. If I were able to get in the pool right now, I would be living in it, but the local pool has no stairs, only ladders, and since I am recovering from a dislocated elbow, I have no way of getting myself out of the pool once I am in it. But I just let it go and she said she would like to come and have lunch anyway, so we decided to go and let Leah swim.

However, I figured there was more to the story and I was right.

While Leah, Lisa, and Daniel were in the pool, I sat with Penny, who told me that in Thailand, no one starts swimming until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon at the earliest, and often not until the evenings. It is considered far too hot to be outside, so they do not swim until later in the day. I explained that here, we consider the water to be the best way to cool off during the hottest part of the day, and so most people start swimming in the morning and spend their evenings inside because it is considered too dark to swim at night.

Penny also mentioned that Thai people like to have very white/pale skin, as pale as can be. When we were watching the DVD of her classmates at home, one of the girls was sitting in the sand where the waves were washing up on shore, rubbing her legs vigorously with sand. Soon, another girl followed. Then Penny came into view and did the same thing. She explained that they all believed it would lighten their skin.

I explained that in America, many people spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to achieve perfect tan status, the darker the better. I told her that this year, with spending more time outside with Leah, I am the tannest I have ever been and am proud of my color. So we decided to compare arms. And guess what? Penny is still darker than I am!!! We were cracking up.

Penny is a great sport. I’m glad we can share our country’s opinions about things like this. I am learning a lot from her and I hope she is learning a lot from us. This is what I pictured our exchange experience to be.

Second Full Day

2010-08-15T18:32:00.001-07:00

Today was our second full day with Penny. She was up early before any of us, and was on the computer by 7:00AM, which made me a little wary that maybe we’d be developing a problem. Compounding that, I received a letter from TMom (as I’m calling Penny’s mom in Thailand) asking me not to let Penny on the computer so much.

I decided it was more of a boredom issue, so after breakfast, Penny gave Leah some gifts and then I got the family together and we took Penny on a tour of our town. There is not much about the Civil War and Colonial America that interests a teenager, particularly one from another country, but we muddled through. I may take her on the town trolley tour sometime in the next three weeks before school starts. We’ll see. Afterwards, we went to Wegman’s to show her a great grocery experience, as she wanted to get some things for when she cooks for us for my birthday party on Saturday. We had a bit of a struggle finding all the ingredients, so finally we agreed to go to the Asian market tomorrow. She did get a microwave “Taste of Thai” meal, which was good because I was getting nervous that she did not eat very much at all.

We got home and she fixed the Thai food and I tried some. It was definitely on the spicy side! But she loved it and ate it right up and remarked how good it smelled. It must be hard to be faced with everything, right down to food, being so different. Tomorrow we will invest in a bunch of those things if it will make her happy. She is definitely a teen. At the store, she asked if we could get some sweets, so I agreed. She chose skittles, Andy Capp potato chip thingers, and Sour Patch Glow-Worms. I have never in my life eaten an Andy Capp potato chip thinger, and it took a girl from Thailand to make sure my life did not pass without the experience. As you might expect, Leah loved them. Penny said, “I love American junk food!” :-D

We got done with that and I decided it was game time. I got Mike upstairs and we broke out our CLR dice game, which we played for Swedish fish. Penny beat us twice. :-) Then we broke out Yahtzee, and guess what? She defeated us again. As Mr. Miagi would say, “You beginner luck!” It was not even close. She had something like 260 points and I had 180 and Mike had 210 or so. Crazy!

Then she asked if I would let her use the stereo, by which she meant the DVD player. Her friends at home made a DVD for her, so we put it in and she sat on the sofa and laughed and tried to explain what was going on. Suffice it to say, there were a lot of kids unleashed on a beach resort in Thailand, and they were having a blast! Then the DVD cut to her school and all the kids made messages for her to say how much they loved her and would miss her, and two of her teachers even were on there. By the time it was over, I was in tears, but Penny was just fine. It made her happy. I went upstairs to collect myself and Mike told her we had made a DVD of Leah’s first year, so she asked to see it and we watched that. Then we had lunch and I asked her about the Wii. She said no.

Here’s the thing. I think AFS must tell these kids that saying yes all the time is not going to work out. So consequently, Penny says no. :-D Here’s what no means:

1. No
2. I do not want you to go to the trouble on my behalf (in answer to such things as “can I fix you a drink?”)
3. I do not know what you are talking about
4. Maybe

So for now, I’m not taking no for an answer. When she said no about playing the Wii, I said OK, and I went upstairs to play, since Leah was napping. About 5 minutes later, Penny came in and sat to watch. About 2 minutes after that, I handed her a Wiimote and asked her if she wanted to play. We played Raving Rabbids for about 20 minutes and then we played Super Mario Brothers for Wii for 3 hours, and laughed our heads off. We took a brief intermission to cook dinner together (cheesy orzo and shrimp scampi) and after we cleaned up, back at it! We were making so much noise Mike was afraid we’d wake up Leah!

Finally, Penny admitted she was tired, so we said good night and she went up to bed. Meanwhile, I emailed an acquaintance down the road who I know has a daughter at Stafford High and she is going to see if her daughter will meet up with Penny and introduce herself to some other people. They host a lot of foreign students, so I know she has experience. Another friend has offered to introduce Penny to the kids in her youth group, and on Tuesday our neighbor in the back is coming over to babysit Leah and meet Penny. So I think she will start to feel much less lonely.

Meanwhile I will continue to make some plans for our time together for the next 3 weeks, because after that it is going to go quick. I’m trying to decide if I can squeeze in a trip to Rhode Island/Boston or not, with my physical therapy schedule (probably not, darnit!). I will take her to DC a couple of times, we’re taking her bowling and to trivia, the mall is nearby, and we’ll see what else I can come up with. She is a great gal with an amazing laugh (I already know I am going to miss that laugh like crazy), and today was a real icebreaker, so I am happy that things are continuing to go well. :-)

Tomorrow is spaghetti day. We literally have 10 pounds of tomatoes dropped off by well-meaning neighbors and friends. (Seriously, I do NOT need any tomoatoes, ok?) Penny says her special food is spaghetti, so I’m going to try my hand at homemade marinara sauce. We are also going to the Asian market, as I said. It should be a great day.