Whirlwind!

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…

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!)

It’s Starting to Happen…

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.

Do You Want to Host?

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!

Time Keeps On Ticking…

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!