WELL, the German girl was tentatively placed with another family who only wanted a 6 month placement (and since then was denied admission at our high school, so isn't coming at all). We were given a choice between an 18 year old girl from Sweden, or a 15 year old boy from Denmark. Not wanting to change the male-female ratio in the house too much, we opted for the Swedish girl. We were approved and just began contact with her this weekend.
This is going to be a transition for us, obviously. Not only are we kind of set up as a one-child family, we have never parented a teenager. BUT - I think it's going to be a great experience for all of us. Mo is so very excited to have a big sister, even if only for a school year.
Now that it's a done deal, we can start on the physical transitions needed to make this work. Currently we have Mo's room, our room, and a sewing room. We have no guest bedroom - when guests come, we either give them our room or send them to Mom's house across the street to stay. SO - we're going to be changing the sewing room to a bedroom for her. I have been spending my recent sewing time downstairs instead to get used to the idea of not having a room dedicated to sewing, and it's actually not too bad to be able to sew and be a part of the family as well. We lose the dining room table during these project times, but that's no biggie...everyone loves TV tray nights, and there's always Mom's house right across the street if we really want a table dinner.
We will need to get bedroom furniture in there - a bed and dresser at least. We're thinking that we'll keep the desk that I use as a sewing table in there for her, but move the rest of the furniture (my work table, shelving, and Mo's sewing desk) out. It's not that big of a room, so we have to try to not crowd it too much.
The hardest part is going to be relocating all the sewing stuff - I have a closet full of fabric, as well as many other arts and crafts supplies in there. I'm thinking my "work" cabinet in the garage may be the new location for these things, especially since I no longer need as many supplies as much of the curriculum is online now (and I'm unemployed, but that's another story all together). One option is to donate all the fabric I have (or most of it) and work on a project by project basis. BUT - I hesitate to do that as fabric is expensive and I have several hundreds of dollars worth of it. I'm thinking of a cataloging plan where I can see what I have and access it without pulling out the whole box to search through.
A funny side-product of this was the little "joke" I played on some of my FaceBook friends last week. When we got the word that she was definately coming, I posted that I was "happy to announce that there will be a new addition to the Larmouth household in the fall". WELL - I had no idea the response that was received...I wanted to mess with a few folks, but everyone got in on it and it spread through our small(ish) town. I thought that I had nipped it in the bud, but last night at Dad's group one guy came up and shook Dave's hand congratulating him on the baby. :) The frustrating thing is that the folks I wanted to mess with didn't even reply at all. OH WELL!
So - about Josefin (pronounced "Yo-sa-feen") - she'll be 18 tomorrow and is from Linkoping Sweden, which is one of the larger cities there. In Sweden they only have to go to school through age 16, so she's in a college prep type program studying physics and math and chem and other such things. She's a swimmer, which is how we ended up with her - Murilo has a deal with the exchange company that he gets dibs on any swimmers that come in. It makes perfect sense since we're at the pool all the time already - and she'll have daily contact (or near daily contact) with Murilo as well. Because of our involvement with the swim club, we already have a built in network of teenage friends from families we know and trust, which will be a huge help - I'm not sure how this would work if we didn't have that support system in place. She just became our Facebook friend, so we have spent much of the morning looking at her Facebook page (which is in Swedish) and copying/pasting text into a translator. She seems like a very well behaved girl, smart and dedicated to her studies, but still knows how to have fun with her friends. Without having met her in person, I'm not sure we could have picked a better "big sister" for Morganne. We'll see how it goes, but I KNOW it will be great!
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