By Brandon Hill on June 17, 2014 • ( Leave a comment )

Exchange Student: Welcome Luca

Today is a sad day for our family: We are saying goodbye to our German Exchange student, Luca, who is heading home today. It has been a wonderful year together and I am looking forward to sharing scrapbook pages of our last year together. I created three albums for him while he was here and sent them back with him. There are a couple of pages from the last few days and his goodbye party that I will ship to him later in the summer when they are completed.

But, lets start at the beginning by remembering our first day together. This spread celebrates our first day together. My son and I headed to the airport with our big German colored welcome sign (made on my Cricut of course!) and our German shirts. Notice that the theme of the page matches the design of the welcome sign – I used my Cricut to cut the same letters in the same font – just smaller for this page.

The pictures are our first picture together holding the welcome sign, eating at Taco Bell on the way home (Luca hadn’t eaten for quite a while), and opening the gift bag we had for him at home. We discovered that Luca (the German) did not like Sauerkraut or pickled fish – two German delicacies that we had for him in the gift bag!

I had to put the parking garage stub on the page as it has the date printed on it which serves as journaling for the page.

Overall we had a great year with Luca and are going to miss him terribly. We are hoping that next summer we will be able to go and visit him – and that or course will make for a wonderful European vacation to scrapbook about next year!

Hosting a Foreign Exchange Student

I just want to put a little plug here for serving as a host family for a Foreign Exchange student. We had a wonderful time doing it during our second year. My son loved having a brother and learning about new places, and it makes our home a little more active 🙂

We used International Student Exchange for our agency and we had a great experience. I encourage you to go to their website (http://www.iseusa.com/) and consider serving in this way.