Good Progress

Well I’ve not exactly been blogging regularly but what is there to say. This exchange is going so well, Norah is a great girl the two girls get along well and there have been no major issues. Norah is speaking really well and is improving every day. The only issue is that they two girls are together so much and Rachel is beginning to find it a strain as they are in the same class all day and never apart. Now over the holidays things will be fine. She is excited about Christmas and having crackers, Christmas pudding and all of the traditional English things that you read about in books. It is the first time that we have had an exchange child over Christmas so it is a new experience for us all.

Well last weekend we had a visit from another German family, they are the new exchange family for Robert. The weekend went well and Robert will go to them in January for 5 months. We have just had Robert assessed and it turns out that he is dyslexic also so now I think that the exchange process is of even more benefit to him. To be able to be fluent in French and German is such an achievement when you have trouble with reading English at 10 years old. ALLEF seem to have found the ideal family for Robert as the boy, Linus loves to ski and they go skiing most weekends in the winter. For Robert whose current ambition is to be a ski instructor this is the perfect exchange family.

When we left Robert in France two years ago it was almost heart breaking as at the last minute he decided he didn’t want to go but we took him anyway. When we pulled away in the car and left him on their doorstep we half thought we would be back within the week to collect him but he settled in well and there were no problems on the exchange at all really it was just a last minute panic from him. This time he seems quite relaxed about the whole process and not so nervous. Perhaps there is so much activity for Christmas he doesn’t have time to think about it all. He can see how well Rachel can speak German after her stay during the summer so he is more than confident that he can do better.

Best Exchange yet?

Well the time is flying and already Norah has been with us a month and dare I say it, it has all been very easy. Rachel and Norah get on well. Norah gets on well with the other two kids and she is a mature well mannered girl. So far this has been the easiest exchange. Usually the first month can be quite draining but this has been fine. Now we are getting to a busy time of the year and all the kids have been off for half term and Halloween. The girls went to stay with Rachels friend Rachel for Halloween night and that all seemed to go well. In a few weeks it will be Rachels 13th birthday and then there are lots of activities happening between now and Christmas so the next two months will pass quickly. 

Last weekend Robert and I went to the ALLEF weekend which was good fun but such a shame that there were only two children for interview. I won’t start ranting again but why don’t families think that it is a good idea? Surely my blog isn’t that depressing. I know sometimes it is hard work but it is work the effort. Anyway it looks like Robert will go to Germany after Christmas so that will be exchange number 4. If it was so bad then the kids wouldn’t want to do another one but a lot of the ALLEF kids choose to do a second one so it can’t be so bad.

I have sorted a French teacher to come to our house for an hour a week now as Rachel seems to have lost her French in Germany so that will help sort that out but also she is bored in French class so maybe we can look at her doing her GCSE early then she can concentrate on Spanish at school. It is good to be ahead of the pack but it isn’t really easy for the teachers as they don’t really know what to do with the kids that are ahead of the pack.

An Extra Child

Well what a busy couple of weeks. Last weekend Norah’s family came to stay from Germany

and hopefully had a good weekend. This was just meant to be a chance for them to come for a visit but a change of plans has meant that it was the start of Norah’s exchange. The family left on Wednesday and Norah had her first day at school in Ireland. So far so good. She is much older than the children we have had on previous exchanges and it makes such a difference. At 12 she can already read and write quite well and although she is still a bit shy with us she obviously can speak quite a bit already. I should think by the end of the exchange her English will be wonderful with no trace of a German accent - perhaps a little Irish accent instead!

The main difference with this exchange so far is that the two girls actually like each other and don’t mind having to spend time together. Time will tell but Norah seems a mature, determined young lady so I am hoping that the next six months will fly past without any major hiccups. Perhaps that it the last thing I should say as then we are bound to have problems.

Bad timing as usual with work means that Lee is working back in London next week and I will be the working single parent of 4 during the week! This is a scary thought. Apart from the exchange child I have Robert about to sit his 11+ in 3 weeks and his scores are going backwards. He is a clever boy but we can’t understand how his marks can be going the wrong way! Kids are a mystery at times. Norah at 12 and the eldest in her house seems to be quite self directed so hopefully everything will happen without too much chaos!

Pick a Language, Any Language

Well what do you get as a result of an exchange with ALLEF - some strange things can happen. On Sunday Rachel phoned her French friend Barbara. Now Barbara can speak English well and has been to stay with us a couple of times and Rachels French was very good. Now that she has spent the last few months in Germany her French is a little rusty. So on Sunday the two girls spent most of the time on the phone speaking German!!! This is an Irish girl who can speak French speaking to a French girl who can speak English but because they both have been on exchange to Germany they can choose to have the conversation in a third language. How good is that. I must say at this stage I am so jealous of my 12 year olds ability and she thinks that it is just soooo ordinary and not at all unusual.

Languages and Dyslexia

We’ll I’ve been very lazy with my blogging in the last month but it has been a busy time. Rachel came back from Germany at the end of August after 3 months. When she went she couldn’t count to ten or say any basic phrases. Well I would hardly say that she is near fluent but she can chatter at a good pace and seems to be able to make herself well understood. This is on top of her fairly good French after her six month exchange a few years ago. This is all pretty amazing considering that she is a twelve year old dyslexic and can hardly spell a word in English.

I don’t really care if she can write French but when we are on holidays she can order food, discuss train times and query prices with ease. I think without taking part in the ALLEF programme she would have been a total failure at languages. I still remember failing all my French exams as I had mispelt every other word and cringing with embarassment as the teached described how stupid I was to the rest of the class! (I did get an MSc and I’m nearly over it now) It made me think that learning a language was too difficult and not an achieveable goal. But when you learn to speak naturally in the country the difficulties posed by learning formally from a book just disappear.

We are certainly one family that are glad to be part of ALLEF. Now I am filling out the form for Robert to do a German exchange. While we are three weeks away from our next exchange child arriving it seems madness to be arranging to do yet another exchange but it is really worth the hard work of hosting the exchange child when you see the benefit that your own kids get from the process.

The downside to all this is that we seem to have a full house for half of the year and have just put in for planning permission to build over our garage as we seem to have extra kids on a regular basis and as our youngest only turned 7 yesterday there is room for a couple more exchanges in the years to come.

All Quiet

Well Paul had a good couple of days with his family and said goodbye to all the people who helped with his English and kept him entertained over the last six months. So here we are back to only two of our own kids. Somehow the house seems very quiet and I miss Rachel even more than I did before.

I know this sounds irrational since she has been on Exchange in Germany since the end of May but I have missed her more this week as she is on holidays in Holland!! I know it is daft as when you gone your gone so it shouldn’t really matter but I have been trying to understand it. Perhaps it is because I’ve been in the exchange familys’ house and have been all around the area so when she talks about somewhere on the phone I have a mental picture. The family have gone on holidays to Holland and I don’t even know where abouts and it makes you feel more out of control as a parent. It is one of the most difficult aspects of the exchange when your child is doing things that you don’t know about or going places you’ve never been. I try not to think about it too much as then you start to worry about all the negative things. In reality they seem to be a really normal family and I’m sure that they have chosen a really nice place to holiday like we would choose for our kids that are the same age. I know when they come back from Holland next week they will send me lots of photos of my child enjoying her holiday and I will look at the photos and wonder why I have been worrying. They have been really good communicating with us and have sent weekly email updates and regular photos since the beginning. I must try really hard to do this when Norah comes to stay with us.

Well that is another question all in itself. When will Norah be coming to stay with us? Rachel is meant to be coming home at the end of August but the family have offered for her to stay longer and Rachel is undecided whether she would like too or not. Apart from that the deal with her school was that she would be back to start the new school year and I’m not sure they would be fine with her missing the beginning of second year, especially when they don’t even do German!. When the family come back from holidays we must discuss all these things and make some decisions as Robert our middle boy wants to do a German exchange after Christmas now.

We live in an area where they still do the 11+, they finish the exam in November of the last year of primary school and after that they do very little more work as they already have covered all the key stage 2 work so it would be an ideal time to fit in another exchange.  What an achievement to be changing schools at the age of 11 speaking French and German. Go Robert! Since I can barely order a meal in French I think the whole process is amazing. I suppose we better start thinking about filling out another ALLEF form and getting ourselves in the system for another exchange.

Will we be able to fit in the return part of Rachels German exchange, Roberts German exchange, renovating our house and a trip to Australia in 2008? We would like to take the kids back to Australia and have been talking about it for the last three years. The two eldest were born there but can’t remember much about it at all. We can’t really afford to take an exchange child with us and I don’t really want to anyway. We are going to be staying with friends for parts of the trip and five people descending on you as house guests is bad enough without a sixth. I’m not sure how our trip can be planned into all this exchange comings and goings. Well we’ll have to give it a go otherwise the kids will end up going back to Oz as a gap year project.

The end is near!

It is Saturday morning and everyone is busy. Paul has gone to football for the last time to say goodbye to all the friends that he has made. By this time next week he will have gone. Will I be sad? - no not for one minute. He isn’t  a bad kid and we haven’t had any major problems during the six months. We haven’t had a kid hanging about homesick, we haven’t had any real sickness issues and apart from the nits it has been pretty plain sailing but still I will be quite glad to be back to our own kids. In the last month Paul’s English has come along so much. The most negative comment people make about the ALLEF exchange process is that they think that they six months is too long. With this exchange we have been able to see just why the six months is necessary as it has only been in the last two months we have seen much progress and Paul’s confidence increase. If he had only been here for 4 months he would have gone home speaking very little English. He at least now has a good base to build on and sounds a little less French every day but we are very close to the wire with this one.

The reaction from people locally when you talk about the exchange process is priceless. It is almost worth the slog of looking after someone elses child for six months to enjoy the shock value of the whole thing. “He’s here for how long! How often do his parents visit? How old is he? You sent you’re own boy to France for six months! Are you related to the family?” is the usual run of the conversation. It never fails to fill the five minute gap while you are waiting for the kids to come out of the changing room at the pool or similiar situations where as parents you have to stand around and do smalltalk. It certainly beats hands down the parents proud of little Johnny’s grade 3 distinction on the violin or similiar achievements. I do find it a wonderful weapon when faced with spending 10 minutes with pushy parents explaining how wonderful their kids are. Yes my kids do go swimming, horseriding, play instruments to a reasonable level etc but they also speak French. Not just counting to ten and naming the colours from an afterschool club they can have real conversations! Considering boasting about the exchange process is so much fun I can’t really understand why ALLEF doesn’t have a waiting list of little Johnny’s ready to go to France or Germany!

Seriously though it is a great thing to do for your child, it is a good experience for the family although hard work at times so why are there not more people prepared to let their children go? Worthwhile things tend to be difficult to achieve - what is the problem with putting the effort in? Why aren’t there more families in the UK and Ireland that would like to have bilingual kids and are prepared to put a little bit of effort in with the help of ALLEF to achieve that goal?

Missing Your Child

I find the first part of the exchange quite exciting. Hearing on the weekly phone calls all about the new family and how the child is settling in. Now though Rachel has been in Germany one month and I’m beginning to miss her a lot. The novelty of her room being always tidy is wearing off and I am missing her girlie contribution to the house and her sense of humour. Yesterday was the Strawberry Fair, the local church fete held every year at the end of June and a must do event for all the local kids. I saw lots of Rachel’s friends and it seemed quite strange that she was not there with them - asking for money to go on the swingboats and for the hoopla stall.

It seems wrong that we should do things without her being involved and able to join in but you can’t spend the whole summer doing nothing at home because one child is away. Still I do feel guilty. She of course is having a great time and has already been on several trips with her new German family and couldn’t really care so it is all in my mind.

It is nearing the end of Paul’s time with us as he just seems to be really getting in his stride. He has made friends and has a good social network. His English has come along leaps and bounds the last few weeks and it is almost a shame that it is so near the end of the exchange. I will be glad that is is over though and we will be down to two of our own kids for six weeks until Rachel returns from Germany with Norah in tow shortly after. Four kids is alot - I know it is trendy at the minute to have more kids but I do find it quite a jump from 3 to four. It is just hard to find time for everybody and to give each kid the attention they deserve. We could say the it is only for a short time and it will be OK as the exchange will soon be over but since we could be doing back to back exchanges for the next three years I think we will need to get cleverer at finding time for everyone. Perhaps it is an impossible goal? I’m not sure whether you could say that having the exchange child short changes any of your own kids when you look at the long term benefits but sometimes it just seems like the elastic is being stretched a little thin.

Big Changes

Paul has only four weeks to go with our family and only in the last couple of weeks has he finally started to talk. It must be a relief for him that he can now have share of voice and it is a relief for us as we didn’t want to send him back home with no English. Now that he is speaking more I am able to correct his pronounciation and hopefully we can get him sounding his ‘h’ in the next couple of week as it makes such a big difference to the way that French people sound speaking English. He also has a cute little ‘a’ sound he likes to put at the end of words but it means that all his words tend to blend into one. Still at least we have made progress. He has had a great week, playing cricket on the green with all our neighbours. He came first in all the races at sports day on Thursday and just beat the local kids hands down. The only down point in the week is the fact that he had head lice which we treated on Monday. So far no one else in the house has managed to get infested. When we had our first French exchange she managed to get lice 4 times and we were all exasperated with her insisting on playing with one child at the village school that was always alive. On the last occasion I threatened to cut her hair short as I was so fed up toothcombing and treating.

We had a lot of news from Germany this week - Rachel is doing really well and trying to say her first words in German. I am so impressed with her motivation, she just seems to take the whole thing in her stride. She had a violin lesson in German this week and did her first maths homework. It is amazing that two weeks in you can just be getting on with things as if they are normal when you are living with people you don’t know, in a country where you can’t speak a word of the language!

Things have been difficult in the house though as the father had a serious accident last week and badly damaged his hand. They are expecting that it will be OK but as it is his left hand and he is left handed and needs to perform surgery I am sure it has been a really stressful week. He will have a plaster on for six weeks and then will have pins removed and they expect that after 4 more weeks with physio he should be OK.

Safe and Sound

Well the trip to Germany went remarkably well. The German family seem lovely and very keen to make the exchange work. On the visit I felt relaxed and welcome in their home. Rachel made a good start with Norah her new exchange sister and Robert got along OK with her brother Jonas. We managed to go into the town, have a look at the school and get a good feel for the area in our short visit. On Monday morning I was sitting on Rachel’s bed and we were having our last chance at a heart to heart for three months. She shed a few tears and said don’t go, stay for longer and then in the next sentance asked if she could stay longer than the planned three months as she didn’t feel that it would be long enough to pick up the language! She was being an adult and a child at the same time.

We left on Monday and she was in good spirits and quite happy to stay with the family. Yesterday (Thursday) we phoned for the first time and she still sounded good. The first two days at school were not so bad. I was worried for her as I thought it would be much harder for a 12 year old to integrate with no language skills than an 8 year old. She was happy enough and was optimistic about settling in at school. So another exchange has successfully started.

On return home things were not so rosie - our youngest David had developed chicken pox and Paul our current French exchange had an infection and needed antibiotics si it had been a busy weekend at home. Now the week has finished, the spots are clearing up and Paul is back on form. Never a dull moment for the family. If you want a quite life becoming involved with ALLEF may not be for you!!