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Diving right in

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I love being a swim Mom. It's so much fun to watch my daughter enjoying her passion. She is improving steadily and has a fantastic outlook.

Fun with Marvin: Day 5

Today looks like a good day for a road trip! We are on our way up to Long Island, NY to visit my parents for the weekend to celebrate my mother’s 65th birthday. The trip is about 370 miles, which is relatively the same distance-wise as going from Oftersheim to Hamburg, Germany. Usually this trip takes 6 and a half to seven hours… unfortunately we hit traffic in many places and it took over nine hours to make the trip!

Lots of traffic does not make happy passengers! On one of our pit stops, we went to Wendy’s (a fast food restaurant). Marvin was shocked at the size of the large drink!

After such a long time stuck in the car, the kids were very happy to be able to go swimming in Grammy and Fossil’s pool.

They were even more excited when Grammy said she was ordering pizza for dinner! There is something special about New York Pizza. Second only to the pizza that Marvin had in Italy, he said this pizza was the best he ever had.

Bryce was super excited to have his favorite chicken parm hero from Little Vincent’s too!

 

We even taught Marvin how to fold his pizza so he could eat it like a real New Yorker!

Fun with Marvin: Day 4

Today was another work day for me since I planned to take off Thursday through Monday in order to take Marvin and the kids to Long Island, NY to visit my parents as well as have a full day in New York City.

My mother-in-law was nice enough to take the boys to the National Marine Corps Museum. http://www.usmcmuseum.com/index.asp

They have interesting displays and a great tribute to the heritage and history of the Marine Corps. Bryce’s great grandfather (his Mom’s Mom’s father) was a Marine and fought in the battle of Saipan that is pictured to the right. The picture to the left is an aerial view of the museum grounds.

Marvin took a lot of pictures while he was here, someday I’d love to see them!

My mother-in-law is a history buff and loves touring all of these types of museums. She even dressed in red, white and blue to tour the museum! The kids told me it was such a long walk outside of the museum to this famous horse. They were hot by the time they got to it and Marvin didn’t want his picture taken.

My parents will celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary this coming September and I made them these t-shirts to wear. They go to Disney every year and they are so cute holding hands walking around the park :-)

Fun with Marvin: Day 3

A laid back day, jet lag kicked in for Marvin and the boys just wanted to hang out in the basement playing some video games. This worked out fine for me since I was working home this day. I took a break from work and took the kids to WalMart to get a soccer ball and then took the kids to the park to play.

Later that evening we had a group function at one of the host families’ home. The kids had a great time cooling off in the pool and learning an American pool game “Marco Polo”. After working up an appetite playing in the pool, the boys devoured some snacks while waiting for dinner to be served.

Fun with Marvin: Day 2

The fun started right away on Marvin’s first full day here. I had to go to work so I could take time off in order to take the kids to New York City later in the week. My mother-in-law Betty was nice enough to entertain them during the day. She took them to downtown Fredericksburg to some of the historical sites and then they went to the movies.

When I got home from work, I took the kids over to the airport where my hubby Keith was giving aerial tours to all the kids in the exchange program. Here Marvin waits his turn chatting with Summer.

Bryce proudly shows off the gracious gift from Marvin’s family so Schwetingen was properly represented.

Another host boy, Connor, looks on with Bryce & Marvin as they all await their turns in the air.

It was a beautiful day for flying!

Now it’s Bryce & Marvin’s turn to go up into the beautiful blue sky!

I think Marvin liked it! You can see the smile on his face from all the way across the runway!

So glad my hubby was willing to share his talents with the group. Everyone seemed to have a great time!

We’re already starting to really like Marvin. He is sweet, polite and funny. Perhaps we’ll keep him :-)

After flying, we went to our favorite Mexican restaurant and we found Herbert!

And it looks like Marvin has a new hat… (on top of his other new hat – say hello to Towelie)

And he certainly enjoyed the (virgin) pina coladas that we had with dinner. Another fun filled day comes to an end and now we’ll get some rest.

Fun with Marvin: Day 1

The day had finally arrived, we’ve waited weeks for him to arrive. Every few minutes I’d refresh my screen to see if his flight from Frankfurt, Germany had landed safely.  The plan was that our group organizer, Cindie Kelly, was to meet the students at the airport in Washington , D.C. and transport them to a more local site. All five host families met at Wegman’s this Sunday afternoon and anxiously awaited their arrival. Before he set foot in the room, just about all we knew about this 15 year old German boy was that he liked soccer and oreos and from his Facebook posts I knew he had a sense of humor. Everything else was still up in the air. 

We were pleasantly surprised at how well he spoke English! I breathed a huge sigh of relief that at least there wouldn’t be a huge communication issue.

 

We settled in quite quickly. That’s one of the blessings of social media: through Facebook, I had communicated with both of his parents as well as directly with him and Bryce had too. I am so thankful for that.

The boys jumped right into the fun (literally)…

I had done some pre-planning in anticipation of the language difference and had post its in various places throughout the house with both the English and German words to indicate where things were housed. I also thought he’d like to know our schedule, so I posted that prominently in the kitchen. This is where I would find Marvin each morning – checking out the schedule for the days ahead.

Although there is a 6 hour time difference, he stayed up surprisingly late the first night. I think it was all the excitement. When he was finally ready to crash we had Bryce’s room set up for both of the boys and Marvin passed out here…

A great ending to the first day of a wonderful adventure!

Fun With Marvin!

Technorati Tags: Marvin,life is good,summertime,New York City

 

 

 

We were so fortunate to have the opportunity to host a student from Germany this summer. We did lots of fun things with him as part of our family and it’s an experience none of us will ever forget. As an added bonus, Bryce will get to go stay with Marvin and his great family next summer. Over the course of his two week stay, we learned lots about him and his family and we are very excited about the next chapter in this friendship developing across the pond. Click the link below to see a slide show of some of our fun!

http://www.smilebox.com/playBlog/4d7a63324d6a4d334d44593d0d0a&blogview=true

This is why I scrapbook...

I love coming into a room and finding one of my children engrossed in our life story. It makes my heart happy.

Love in Action

                                                                                                                                                                   A tidbit from yesterday for my Project Life.

 

Love the snuggle between my daughter and husband. As I looked at the photo I noticed some other items worth documenting in the background. Sometimes it's nice to step back and get some of the clutter and the everyday-ness into the photo. {Love in action brush from Ali Edwards at www.designerdigitals.com}

2013 One Little Word: PRESENT

My word for 2013 is present. With returning to work full time this year, in addition to homeschooling my 10 yo DD for medical reasons since August, I feel pulled in a million directions. I want to focus on being ‘present’ in the moment as much as possible. Additionally, both of my kids had serious, potentially life threatening health scares this year and we almost lost my Mom in a terrible car accident, the fact that they are all still ‘present’ is a ‘present’ to me. I’m looking forward to being PRESENT in Ali Edward's One Little Word class as well!

Click here for some other posts about my words from previous years.

What will your word be?