Welcome Eve

It's the night before the night we pick up Urara.  It's hard to believe!  We chose her in November, and now we are on the cusp of her arrival.  YIKES!  It has been so weird to have so much time, and yet I didn't really prepare much before this week.  So now, I have been running around like crazy, trying to get everything ready and in place so we can have a smooth transition.

It's odd, reflecting on my past hosting experiences, which I can't help but do.  This time last year, we didn't even know Ine existed.  We were matched with her at the end of August, and she arrived at our house just about 2 weeks later.  We communicated via email 2 or 3 times before she arrived, but we had no sense of who she was, and it was a rush.  We have had a couple of months to email Urara, and get to know her a little better.  She seems lively and cheerful, and of course excited.  When Ine arrived, I left two days later to go to London.  Urara will be here for 2 weeks before school starts, and although we have a lot of territory to cover in that time and a lot to do, it's still 2 weeks to get to know one another and bond and communicate and learn from each other that we missed with Ine.  In contrast, we had a full month with Penny, who didn't start school till after Labor Day, and there were times that the days seemed to drag on, trying to entertain a teenager and a 1 year old, and figure all that out.

Still, there are similarities.  One of my favorite activities is figuring out what we are going to to take to the pick up location to welcome our student with.  We always take a stuffed animal, and I always make a flag with their name on it, and we bring a US flag as well.

This year, I took Leah to Build-A-Bear Workshop.  She'd been after me to go, as they have an Elsa bear from Frozen.  She really wanted one, and she's been so good this summer adjusting to life as a day care kid, so I agreed to take her to get one if we could make a bear for Urara.  She initially said that was my job, but once she got into it, she wound up making the bear herself!

As you can see, we traded in the American flag for a US flag pinwheel, and Leah helped decorate Urara's name flag with stickers.  We chose to use a lot of pink, as that is Urara's favorite color.  Leah enjoyed the BAB process, she got to put a heart inside the bear and groom her, and she even got to name her and print out a birth certificate.  The bear's name is Zuma, for some reason.  Go figure.

But Leah is just thrilled to have made the bear and will probably insist on carrying it tomorrow. :)

I also like to put a welcome basket in the room, and so we've spent some time shopping around town for little odds and ends.  I never put anything too exciting in there--pens, a notebook, something for the student to do with Leah to break the ice a bit, something about town.  This year's basket includes a fancy box of tissues Leah found and fell in love with--pink of course and shaped like a purse.

She also picked out some Frozen candy and a pink glitter cup.  I'll be drowning in pink before the next 10 months is over!

Because I am not too sure how Urara's English is, I invested in a couple of Japanese/English phrase books, and they arrived from Amazon promptly.

I'm giving the Oxford Picture Dictionary to Urara directly, although she has probably come with something, because all the Japanese is written in Japanese characters, not in phonetics, and I can't understand it at all.  I hope to learn some Japanese this year, I really enjoyed learning Thai writing when Penny was here and she said I had surprisingly good penmanship, so I hope that translates!  I hope to at least be able to ask Urara if she is hungry or tired as needed, and we can always text one another if we need to as well. :)

I also made a little binder for her with all our household information and information about town.  AFS gives each family a participant questionnaire that you can sit and talk with your student about the household rules and such, and I thought it would be helpful to have it all written down in advance as well for when we sit down to talk about it.  I was so happy to find some fun stickers to add to the cover!  You can't see them so well, but there is the US Capitol on the bottom, as well as a kimono, and I put Japanese and US flags on top.

I would be remiss if I didn't thank my friend Amber for stopping off at the local visitor's center and bringing back all kinds of travel brochures about our area.

I also attended parents' orientation at Urara's school, which was informative even if Ine did attend the school last year.  It was fun to see the people in charge again and talk to them about AFS.  They are very excited that AFS is sending another student their way.  I got a nice picture of the school while I was there.

Otherwise, we have been cleaning the house like crazy.  I am not the tidiest person that ever lived, a byproduct of having a young child in the house and preferring to be the fun parent than the parent who keeps the house looking like a showplace, so we are often cluttered.  But I have been busting my hump hard this week, and I think I need to put a plan in place that we all pitch in and clean up here once a week. 

The first week should go by quite quickly!  My plan for tomorrow is simply to pick Urara up at 7pm as directed by AFS Virginia, get her home, give her a quick tour of the house, and get her to bed.  She should be on a good schedule by now, as she has been in the US since Wednesday morning, but I want to hit the ground running on Saturday.  We will give her a tour of town Saturday, and stop off at the farmer's market as well as the grocery store so she can pick out some foods she likes.  Then we will spend Saturday afternoon at the swimming pool before cooking out in the backyard for dinner.

Sunday I will introduce her to life at the UU, and introduce her to my friends there.  Monday, we will go over to her school in the morning to learn about what her computer needs to be able to do, and Monday afternoon we will go back to meet with the head of the upper school and get her schedule cemented into place.

Tuesday I have to work, so I will have to give her some choices in activities. My mom will be back in town and might be willing to entertain her a bit, although I'm not sure.  She could also go to the mall, hang out with Leah, or ??  We'll figure something out.

Wednesday is a big day, as Ine is arriving back in the US.  I turn 40 on August 23 and am having a party, and Ine decided she wanted to come back and celebrate with me.  I am so moved about this, I can't express it, not only that Ine and I cultivated the kind of relationship that would bring her back after only 6 weeks, but that her parents would allow her to come back so soon.  Thursday I am supposed to work again, and then Friday we will get ready for my party, which is on Saturday.  The following week, Urara starts school already, which is IMPOSSIBLE to believe...

So it's going to go by very quickly, I suspect, and it will be a great deal of fun.  Because I tend towards introversion, I often don't like the first weeks of the exchange experience, but I feel like this time it will be fine.  I have found that having plans and keeping busy is the key to a successful start; if we are doing, I don't feel as if I have to be so interesting and smart all the time!

So I'll be writing again soon about our pick up experience!!  Keep checking back for updates, and thanks for following our journey.