Um, It Has Been Quite A While, Has It Not?

Wow – it’s been OVER A YEAR since my last post. What the heck? I have no idea why I was such a slacker. I have no excuse.

So very much has happened since December of 2010. Don’t worry – I won’t try to fill you in on the entire year in one post.

We had a wonderful year with our last exchange student, Anna from Germany. She fit with our family like a glove and made up for the sour feeling in the pit of my stomach that our Norwegian girl left. Of course, sending Anna home was incredibly difficult as we would have liked to keep her FOREVER. But, alas, that’s not a decision you get to make when you host an exchange student. You welcome a kid into your family, hopefully have a wonderful year and form a bond that will last forever, and then you have to put them on a plane to go back to the family they belong to. E-mail, Facebook and Skype are wonderful, but just not the same as dancing around the kitchen to music you both love or taking them to the vast outdoors of the western states and seeing the wonder in their eyes at the miles and miles of absolutely nothing that exists here and doesn’t exist in their country. Not that I’m knocking other countries. It’s just that in Germany, for instance, which is incredibly lovely, you’re never out of sight of some kind of reminder that people exist. And you can drive for quite a long while in parts of Idaho and Utah without seeing so much as a shack by the side of the road.

Anna is probably going to be our last exchange student. We’re winding down on the high school years in our house. Technically, we should be empty nesters since both of the kids I personally gave birth to are now part of the greatest Navy in the world (yep, my son followed his sister’s footsteps and is now at Nuke school in South Carolina). My own sister has had some issues with alcohol in her life and as a result, both of her kids are currently living with us. My niece graduates from high school this year and my nephew is a junior. My niece will probably attend Boise State University for at least one year, so we’ll have two kids living with us for the next 16 months at a minimum. It’s nice still having kids at home, though, so I’m not complaining.

I think that’s enough for one post, lest I write the ABC Novel for Television (yes, I’m THAT old).