Nearly October!?

I really, really can’t believe it is the end of September already.  While the first weeks Kristin were here did often seem to drag on a bit, now that she’s been in school, the time is flying by.

Kristin commenced school right after Labor Day and is doing fine.  She has typical exchange student problems of not really catching everything in class that’s being said, and often feels worried about her homework assignments, not being entirely sure what to do.  Fortunately, her teachers are very helpful and when I email them, they happily email us back with a more detailed explanation, which we find helpful.  We spend a couple of hours at night on homework—my task is to be the resident spelling bee.  I’ve spelled everything from “environment” to “collect”.  Kristin’s least favorite letters are E and I, as she finds it hard to remember which is which.

Sometimes she ties in the things we do to her homework and that cracks me up.  I have an obsession with the TV show Hoarders, so last night when she had to write a monologue for her drama class, she decided to write one about a hoarder.  She used the show as research for what a hoarder would talk about.  Pretty smart girl!

A couple of weeks ago, Kristin joined the cross country team.  Occasionally she comes home vowing to quit, but she always changes her mind the next day as she says, “I like my teammates!”  It is very physically demanding and she comes home sore and exhausted, and then has lots of homework today.  Often she feels that she doesn’t have much time to relax.  It has been good for her in terms of meeting people, however, and she had a genius way of getting to know people better by loudly announcing at practice, “I hate the activity bus!” so someone offered her a ride home.  I thought that was pretty ingenious, actually, so way to go Kristin!

She has been to a football game or two.  We were talking yesterday about it and she said she doesn’t understand the rules.  I, who have been watching the Patriots for 10 years now, also do not understand the rules, but gamely attempted to explain them to her.  My explanation in part was, “You get an extra point if you kick it through the Y shaped thingy at the end”…  Believe it or not, she knew what I was talking about.

this weekend, Kristin had her first AFS orientation.  I think she enjoyed it and immediately came home and added all her new pals on her Facebook.  We also got in a couple games of laser tag on Friday and a trip to Cold Stone, her favorite!

I guess the big excitement is that we asked Kristin to do some Icelandic cooking for us.  She settled on two dishes—Skyr and rice pudding.  Now, of course, you can get Skyr in the grocery store but I was informed that it’s not very good, even in Iceland, and needs to be dressed up to be edible.  She got the recipe from home and we had our friends Andy, Melissa, and Emily over as they are enthusiasts of international cooking.  The Skyr was done in an instant, she was an expert on that.  The rice pudding was more of a challenge and finally Kristin announced, “this is boring, I’m sick of cooking it!” and served it as is, which was nice and creamy, but the rice was rock solid.  We all found it hilarious.  We also got out the rest of the Icelandic chocolate and the Icelandic fish.  Kristin also made us apple sandwiches, so we had a real feast!

Everything was a big hit!

This week we will take our first roadtrip.  My dad is turning 60 and we are heading up to New York to celebrate.  It will be the longest trip Kristin’s ever taken in the car—10 hours at least—and we are preparing her by packing snacks, drinks, and a DVD player.  It’ll be nice to show her rural America and the people I grew up with.  I hope she enjoys herself!!  I’m looking forward to having a break and getting away for a couple days. 

Kristin is also “hosting” a Pampered Chef show in October, with a Cold Stone ice cream theme.  If she’s still here, we are going to go to a book signing with Diane Keaton, are in discussions with a  friend about a trip to Philadelphia to see Sara Bareilles, and are debating other fun and games as the year progresses.  We just have to find out what she wants to do!  Sooooo….

When we get back, it’ll be decision time.  We’ve asked Kristin what she thinks about staying here for the rest of the year and her answer is, “I don’t know”.  I think it’s possible in some ways she would be much happier with a family with older kids and pets, but she has settled in nicely here as well.  There have been times I’ve been convinced she’s going to give me trouble, and I’m glad to say I’ve been wrong—things have gone quite smoothly.  So we have offered her the chance to stay.  Whether or not she takes it, that’s up to her!  We won’t be upset either way.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print!!!  See you all from the other side of our NY trip!

Lessons Learned at Giant

Going to our local grocery store has provided some interesting lessons in our cultural differences. 

Kristin got out of the car as the person in the car next to her was getting in.  He said, “Oh, excuse me” as is pretty normal in our culture, but Kristin finds it hilarious that people say ‘excuse me’ as they go past each other.  I explained the concept of personal space and how Americans don’t really like to get too close to each other without excusing themselves, but apparently in Iceland it’s no big deal.

On a different visit, rather than visit self check out, I decided to let the lonely-looking clerk at the check out do our groceries.  He was a friendly enough guy and said, “Do you want to be a re-useable shopping bag?”  I said, “No, I enjoy destroying the environment for free” and the guy busted up laughing and we started chatting like old friends.  Pretty soon, another woman got on line behind us, looked at our purchases, and asked us what we were baking (peanut butter bars and cashew bars for an AFS picnic).  I told her and she asked how to make them, I explained it was our first try doing it and I wasn’t sure of the recipe, that kind of thing, and between the 3 of us, we had a very nice exchange.

When we got out to the car, Kristin said, “Americans will tell you their life story even if you don’t know them!”  She can’t get over how everyone talks to each other, even asking if I knew those people, which I didn’t.  I think it’s friendly, she thinks it’s crazy.  :) 

I think Iceland may be a very quiet place!

Everything Else

Well, I’ve written all the fun and games, and some of the not so much fun, that took up our 3 weeks welcoming Kristin.  Today marks 4 weeks since she arrived and Monday marks one month since we brought her home.  So what are some of the things we’ve learned about each other?

1.  Iceland and Icelanders are used to dealing with natural disaster.  Americans panic at the thought of a severe thunderstorm.  Unfortunately, with the way the media blows the threat of impending storms way out of proportion, it causes natural families in Iceland to panic at the thought of their beloved daughter being swept out to sea on the waves of a vicious killer hurricane, after the entire Eastern seaboard is broken off in a killer earthquake.  In contrast, a 12 hour loss of electricity doesn’t seem so bad.  There are currently cluster earthquakes happening in Iceland centered around a major volcano.  While it is worrying, Icelanders seem to be adopting a “wait and see” attitude.

2.  Halloween is getting so crazy here in the US that Kristin is powerfully excited for October 31 to roll around.  In Iceland it is customary that the children dress up, go to local shops and sing a song, for which they are given treats.  By contrast, Kristin has been taking picture of Halloween miniature villages in craft stores, debated costume choices, pondered Halloween parties, seen candy displays in stores, and enjoyed looking at inflatables for the yard.  She literally giggles every time we see something and last night confided, “I can’t wait for Halloween!”  I hope she’s not disappointed that she’ll spend the day in school and trick or treating is no big deal.  Fortunately, AFS is having a Halloween party if nothing else.

3.  Christmas has come up already as a time that she feels she will be very depressed and homesick.  She explained that in Iceland they have 13 Santa Clauses, and they get small presents every day for 13 days prior to Christmas.  On Christmas Eve, they open their gifts and have a big dinner and get all dressed up.  I explained our Christmas traditions, and was informed they are “stupid”.  I chose not to be insulted by this, mainly because Kristin’s favorite word is “stupid” and she uses it to describe everything from the fact that there are no sidewalks in our neighborhood to the fact that the color of a building doesn’t suit her.  I told her that provided she’s still with us, I would be happy to incorporate some of the things she is used to doing for the holidays into our celebration, but internally immediately panicked as this indicates a long-term view of this hosting experience with which I am not yet entirely comfortable!  However, I do believe that since it is not only Kristin’s exchange, but ours as well, that if she’ll let us, we would incorporate some of her traditions into our celebrations as a fun and new way of doing things.

4.  Teenagers share certain similarities the world over.  Where Penny would spend an hour curling her hair, Kristin will spend an hour straightening hers.  I am assured by friends with teen daughters here in the US that their girls behave similarly. 

5.  The weather we’ve had has been a challenge for Kristin.  She said last night that was so excited to come to Virginia because she was sure it was going to be sunny and warm and she’d get an awesome tan.  Unfortunately, it’s done a whole lot of raining since she arrived.  She says everyone at school is so nice and brown, and she was very proud of the tan she did managed to get until she saw all of them.  I pointed out they had an extra few months of sun and she was working inside all summer bagging fish.  Her response?  “Stupid fish”.

6.  Kristin really is pretty obsessed with big houses and fast cars.  I think she was under the impression that we all live like they do in Malibu or Beverly Hills, with flashy cars and fancy houses and tons of cash to throw around.  Sadly for her, that is not the case.  And of course, our house has been in a state of rebellion since she arrived.  Still, when we were up in Vienna for the pool party, she saw all the big houses and stated, “I’d like to live here!”  Whenever we’re out, she looks at all the cars she finds amazing when we pass and says, “Cool car!”  Sadly for her, she’s stuck in middle-suburbia with a host mom who drives a station wagon.

7.  Kristin didn’t know what Columbine was.  We watched a fake documentary about 2 boys who plotted to blow up their school and kill a bunch of people, and at the end, the scene in which they carry it out was taken directly from the video of the Columbine library.  She was shocked that something like that actually happened, and I showed her pictures of the real people involved and told her about the fact that Mike and I were on vacation when Columbine happened and 3 years later got married on the anniversary of it happening.  I find it interesting that it never entered her consciousness, but I guess kids of a certain age and kids who aren’t American have no frame of reference….

I really have enjoyed the past 4 weeks very much.  I feel far more mellow than when Penny was here, I suppose in part because I view this as a largely transitory experience, although I do have thoughts of it lasting all year from time to time.  Kristin implied on Monday that she is afraid to move somewhere else where she doesn’t know the people due to the largely positive experience she’s had thus far, and I admit there was a little lump in my throat when we thought we’d found her a permanent family.  We’ll see what happens!

Monuments, Yahtzee, Alphabets, and Rock

This has been the longest week of my life—none of which has really anything to do with Kristin.  Monday, the clean up crew arrived to begin work on our basement and since then, we’ve affectionately dubbed our basement “The Wind Tunnel” owing to the number of fans and dehumidifiers going down there, and I’ve been calling my house “The Pit of Despair” owing to the fact that I want to just cry whenever I think about the job ahead of us.

So I decided to put all my cards on the table and do my nighttime tour of DC early.  One of the few things Kristin was able to communicate prior to her arrival was that she really wanted to see famous tourist sites while she was in the US.  She specifically mentioned the White House and the Capitol, so Monday night, I bundled her up and off we went.  Of course, we got stuck in traffic on 395 which prompted a disgusted, “URGH!” from her and with which I most vehemently concurred.

We left around 8:30 and made it to DC just before 10, a new low.  We had a really nice chat all the way up—talking about her brother, about disability services in Iceland, about all kinds of really interesting topics.  But all was forgotten when we got there and she started seeing things and her camera refused to work.  It staunchly refused to take pictures at night that weren’t black!  I offered her mine, but she continued to play with hers and just told me what she wanted pictures of if she couldnt’ get hers to cooperate.

Our first stop was the Capitol building.  Some nice passersby came and offered to take her a picture on her memory card, but she declined in favor of me taking one on my little camera, so this is what I got for her:

I was really stoked about the moon Monday night—I thought it was a cool addition the pictures we were taking! :)

After that, we drove past the park in front of the White House, as close as we could get to it and I pulled over and she tried to get pictures, but again, nothing came out.  Consequently, we used mine, and my zoom isn’t that great and there were signs in the way, so our sole picture was rather disappointing, but I had to move along as the cops didn’t take kindly to me blocking the road they’d blocked already with traffic cones!

That accomplished, we drove over to the WWII Memorial to park.  Seeing it from the car prompted an “Ooooh!” from Kristin and she loved it, as I think most people do when they see it.  We worked hard on getting her a decent picture with the fountains and were finally somewhat successful!  We walked all over the memorial and I told her that now that she is a Virginian, we had to get her picture with the Virginia pillar, which she happily obliged me with.  I think I shall take all my exchange students there forever, it’s a fun way to really concretely (pardon the pun) put a sense of their own history into their minds. 

Afterwards, we began our trek down to the Lincoln Memorial.  I’m very glad that the lighting has improved a great deal down the path.  Several years ago, my AFS brother Franc from Ecuador came to visit and we did the night time DC tour and walked in utter pitch blackness down the same path.  I’m pleased that at least there are some improvements in the lighting so it’s not quite so scary to be out there now!  Along the way, I pointed out the WWI Memorial, a modest little memorial off to one side of the mall.  Compared with the grandeur of the WWII Memorial, it’s quite sad, but it was a nice study in contrasts for Kristin.

Before hitting the Lincoln, I told Kristin we would go visit the creepiest memorial on the mall, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and she concurred with my assessment that it IS rather creepy!  We didn’t linger there for very long, as I think she was a little weirded out by the haunting statues that are there.

With that, we set off to the Lincoln Memorial and I met Kristin upstairs as I had to make a quick potty break.  We got some photos for her and she enjoyed the view.  There were some other tourists there (not that I consider myself a tourist, but whatever! haha) taking a photo and their picture taker was laying on the ground to get the shot.  Kristin informed me it would be a beautiful picture, so I willingly obliged and did the same for her.  The things I do for my kids!

Then we went back down the steps.  There is a new Martin Luther King Jr. memorial opening at the end of the month, so there are a lot of fences up around the place, but we found a place to go through and went around to the Vietnam Wall, which always is a sobering place to visit.  She was blown away by the sheer number of names occupying the wall and the significance of it and it was a quiet moment for us both.

On the way back to the car, we stopped off at the small island they built to commemorate the signers of the Declaration of Independence and then made our way back to WWII in a swarm of little insects, of which I have no idea what they are, but which annoy me half to death every time I go down there at night and get attacked by a swarm of them.  Kristin is quite squeamish of bugs, so it was a real trial to her!

We got back to the WWII and I messed around a bit with the black and white setting on my camera and got a couple of interesting pictures and then it was off to the FDR Memorial.

Much of the time when I bring people down at night, the FDR fountains are shut off, which really, really ruins it for me.  The FDR is probably my favorite memorial just due to the beauty of the waterfalls—the WWII is my other favorite because my grandfather was a WWII veteran!  I wanted Kristin to be able to see it fully lit and working, and as we walked up to it, I didn’t hear anything and expressed my aggravation.  But as we got inside, she said, “I hear water!” and sure enough, the fountains were on.  AMEN!  She saw the first one and said, “WOW!”, Kristinspeak for “This is awesome!”  She put her feet in and then read the sign, “No wading” and giggled “Oops!” 

We walked through and I encouraged her to climb out onto the rocks of another fountain—it used to be OK to do so when it first opened, but I’m sure some idiot fell off and that was the end of that.  However, I have many pictures of myself on those rocks and got one of Kristin as well.

Afterwards, we went down the short path to the Tidal Basin and she loved the view of Washington from the water.  She snapped quite a few pictures, and I just sat and relaxed and took in the view myself.  As we went back up to the memorial, the timer must have clicked off or whatever, because all the fountains stopped.  I was so pleased we had made it in time and she got to see it—she was my good luck charm!

I asked her how she was holding up and if she was tired, and she said she was quite hungry. I told her we had one more stop and then I’d get her something to eat, and we went over the river to the US Marine Corps Memorial.  She couldn’t believe how big it was—she thought it was much, much smaller.  She walked all around it and took lots of pictures.

Then we hopped into the car and went over the a local McDonald’s that was just closing, so that was a bust.  We then went to a 24 hour CVS and grabbed some food.  Kristin grabbed a chicken sandwich, half of which I found on the counter the next morning and she declared it, “not very good”.  So that kind of sucked for her!   I resolved to make a big meal for her Tuesday night and made a big pot of spaghetti sauce and pasta, of which she ate 3 helpings, plus 3 slices of Texas toast, so I’ve hit on a winner there, far more than pork chops :)

Wednesday night, her liaison came over to see her when I sounded the alarm about everything going on.  They had a very nice time, making pizza and playing with April’s dogs and I had asked April to try and find out how Kristin was really feeling about the situation with our house, but really she had no complaints apparently and April asked us to just relax a bit and let things happen.  But she also did talk to Kristin about the importance of coming out of her room a bit!

So yesterday (Thursday) was supposed to be her school registration appointment, but that got cancelled.  I feel bad for this poor kid—we were supposed to go up to Skyline Drive Wednesday, but that got cancelled because my friend got sick.  I was hoping she’d get to go hang out with this girl from the high school that I met via one of Penny’s friends, but that is postponed till next week because that girl’s mom is out of town.  We’ve spent a lot of time sitting around waiting for clean up crews and insurance adjustors and whatnot, and yesterday came home to wait for the clean up crew only to have them call and cancel at 4pm! 

So I was really feeling pretty grim, but it was then that Kristin decided to spend the day hanging out with us.  We went over to my friend Jacalyn’s house for a little while and then we came home and had lunch and I put Leah down for a nap.  Kristin and I sat and looked over the school website for a few minutes, and I had asked her several times if she wanted to check her email or her Facebook, but she always said no.  She was just kind of playing with the school website, so I said, “You know what, I’m going to go sit in the living room and read my book.  If you need anything, holler.”  And she said, “Can I upload my pictures?”  I told her to go ahead and go crazy, and she spent several hours online, I think emailing and Facebooking and whatever else.  During that time, my neighbor’s daughter called and asked her if she wanted to spend Monday going to lunch and doing some shopping, and she was so happy and decided to take her up on it.  So she has that to look forward to.  She watched Tangled twice with Leah, and even let me leave Leah here when I went to pick Mike up from the train.

Mike decided on the way home that we would play Yahtzee after dinner, and so we introduced her to the wonderful world of Yahtzee, which she lost, but which was a lot of fun and broke the ice in many ways.  Last year, I became very friendly with many host moms, as I’ve said, and one of them said to me yesterday, “Ask her what she needs to be comfortable.”  So as we sat down to play, I said, “Well, Kristin, it’s been a week now, and it’s been a hard week.  To be honest, all I’ve done this week is cry and I know it hasn’t been easy on you either.  So what can we do to make you more comfortable here?”  She said, “Nothing really, I am just fine.”  So again we thanked her for her patience, which she kind of shushed off.  Then all of a sudden, she jumped up and ran to her room and came back and said, “I forgot!  I brought you volcanic rock.” and gave us a pretty awesome rock.  She said, “I hiked all the way to the top of the volcano to get this for you” and my eyes must have gotten big because she started laughing and said, “No, not really, I drove up and got it!”  She started joking around with us a lot after that and it turns out she has a pretty wicked sense of humor!  Then she asked if I’d like to see the Icelandic alphabet, which I did, and she wrote it out.  I got her a copy of the Braille alphabet and some writing that she and Mike had worked on together and wrote out what it said for her so she had that, and we had fun making Mike and me pronounce words in Icelandic and her laughing about it, as well as us laughing about Icelandic names like “Brinhyldur” which is really not even close to anything common here in the US. 

It was a really lovely evening, a major icebreaker for us all, and really a balm to the soul after what we’ve been through.  I’m very excited to have done it and excited for the weekend.  Tonight I’m taking her to see Barenaked Ladies at Celebrate Virginia live, and being that she has never been to a concert before, I’m pretty excited about that one as I think it’ll be an awesome experience for her.  Tomorrow we will go to a “slumber party” without sleeping over at my friend Melissa’s house, which will be a lot of fun.  Sunday she wants to Skype with her family, which is fine, and Monday she will go out with Katie.  Tuesday is my birthday and we will FINALLY get to go to her school appointment!  And then we’ll see what the rest of next week brings.  I am very optimistic that this is going to work out just fine. :)