And 4 becomes 5...

Talk about changes to your comfort zone - in a couple of hours, our 4-person (and 1 dog) family dynamic will be altered to include a teenager from Chile (Anne gave the story here). Given that our kids at still pre-teen (tween?), this will be a bit of a change. Oh yeah, and there's the Spanish/English language aspect as well...

That said, I'm looking forward to this adventure. Anne and I went to our AFS orientation, and, while listening to the other folks there that have been host families before, I think this will be a really cool opportunity. It will be different, and there will be challenges, but I believe this will be an overall positive experience (you get what you put into it, right?).

Juanchi's Room

Here's my quick list of the upcoming change areas:

1. How we do what we do - not only does Juanchi not know anything about our household and how we operate, he's from another country and probably isn't familiar with a lot of what we all take for granted. There's going to be a lot of explaining about "what time do we sit down for dinner?", "how does the washing machine work?", and "do we leave the toilet seat up or down?"
2. Another seat at the table - part of the responsibilities of the host family is to cover room and board for the student. So, in addition to a full makeover of Leah's room into Juanchi's room (see pictures), we'll also be including a new person (and tastes) into the mix for meals. Cons - he could be as picky of an eater as Alex is. Pros - we could expand our taste boundaries based on his food experiences.
3. Mom's Taxi - the kids are not yet at the point where we have to drive them all over the place (Anne might disagree, since she runs the taxi service in our house), but since one of the guiding rules of AFS is "No Driving", having J as part of the family means more places to go. Good thing that Ballard High is within walking distance...
4. Communications - with a non-native English speaker in the mix, we're not going to be able to yell from room to room give directions remotely. We talked last night about the need to be clear in what we say (and how we say it), as well as to try to repeat the request back (e.g. "Leah - please feed the dogs. Sure mom - I'll feed the dogs"). Not only will this be a nice change from our current mode of conversation with the kids (which include some level of grunted replies and exaggerated sighs), it will help ensure that Juanchi has correctly processed the request (rather than just smiling and nodding, without actually comprehending what we're saying). If we all do it this way, it can only help.
5. Stuff - Juanchi is going to come with a bag (or two) of clothes, but will need to buy more essentials here. Since America is the land of happy capitalism, I'm sure he's looking forward his first trip to Target. In fact, he emailed Anne the other day asking whether he could purchase "large underwear" in the US. Once we figured that this meant boxer shorts (we think), we assured him that he can get that here. But of course, there's going to be a range of purchases that he wants to make - a bike, a cell phone, a laptop, etc etc. Helping him with these purchasing choices (and assisting him in the actual purchases - whether by driving to the store or getting him set up for Internet purchases) is going to take time and effort.
6. He's a teenager - I was thinking that we were at least another couple of years away from meeting with high-school counselors and picking out courses, dealing with teenager social angst (on top of new-country-far-from-home angst), and overall teenager attitude, but here it is already. Since we've already been talking with Juanchi on Skype quite a bit, we're reasonably confident that he's a solid kid, but there's going to be a whole new world of teenager-related experiences that we'll have. At least it will get us prepped for Alex and Leah...