Welcome to our new blog, thanks for stopping by! I created this blog to document our family journey with a foreign exchange student (I'll tell you all about him later on in this post). Let me start at the beginning, and how this all began...
It was July 29, 2013 when I seen a Facebook post on a local Allendale, MI page called
Allendale Informed. The post was by a woman named Sonia from an agency called
World Heritage, looking for host families for the upcoming school year. This is always something that I have wanted to do since I was in high school (so not that long ago, lol). I responded to the post and immediately had more information from Sonia about the process and what was involved. I was excited immediately and hoped my husband and three boys would find the idea just as exciting! Later that day I spoke with Chad, my husband, and he was definitely interested as well (yay!). So that evening around the dinner table we talked to our boys about the possibility of having a student from another country join our family for the entire school year. I think they were a little unsure of what that would entail, but everyone was on board! I immediately contacted Sonia and wanted to know what we had to do next. She directed me to the World Heritage
website to do an online application. By the next morning I had four possible students to pick from! She sent me their name, country, age, and a letter that they had written to their prospective host family. I had already told Sonia that we would like a boy on the younger side preferably, so that he would be closer in age to our own boys (Josh-12, Luke-11, Jake-5). There was this boy from Denmark named Marcus that immediately caught our attention. In his letter he described how much he liked spending time with his family, how he liked to play soccer, and how he could add a lot of Danish coziness to our family...sold!! I called Sonia and told her that we had chosen Marcus. There were a few more steps that we had to get through before we could be approved as a host family. I got on that right away and on August 6, 2013 I received the most wonderful voicemail from Marcus...he was officially "ours" and he was so thankful and excited that he would be joining our family soon! (I don't ever think I will delete that voicemail by the way, it was so very sweet!)
So that is how it all began. I wish that I had started this blog sooner, but I'll catch you all up here now :)
After the initial phone call from Marcus, we immediately found each other on Facebook. This was exciting, I could finally put a face to a name! We sent some messages via Facebook and then set up a time to Skype. I knew about Skype, but hadn't ever used it. On August 9th, we skyped and it was the most wonderful thing! I couldn't believe how well he could speak English (Danish is his native language). I got to meet his mom that day on Skype, as well as his younger siblings, his dog, and eventually his dad on another skyping session. It was a great way to get to know each other a little bit more, and I'm sure comforting for Marcus' parents to meet the family that he would be living with for nine months.
Marcus' date of arrival was to be August 29, 2013. In the three weeks before he came our family prepared for his arrival by getting his room set up for him, and Google-ing and YouTube-ing everything Denmark :) I still spoke with Marcus via Facebook messaging almost daily. He was getting very excited to come and we were definitely getting very excited for him to be here!
