Newport

Last summer Julianne won a family pack of tickets to the Newport Aquarium. Ever since, we've been looking for a good weekend to go, and we finally found it! We spent the night at a wonderful condo and had a great time playing around and having some good family fun. This was the view from our balcony.


On Sunday we visited the Aquarium. What fun! Lots of cool sea critters to see, and even some we could touch.
Before leaving Newport, we stopped at a really cool 50's style diner for some ice cream. While we were waiting for our order, Caleb showed his stuff!
On our way home we stopped at Cape Perpetua so Marie could experience one of the most beautiful viewpoints on the Oregon coast. It's well worth the time it takes to drive to the top of the mountain.

Click here for more pictures of our Newport trip.

No training wheels!

This past week Elisa was riding her bike when I noticed she wasn't using the training wheels. The bike had previously been ridden by someone too big for it, causing the support bars for the training wheels to bend, making it so that only one training wheel could touch the ground at a time. As Elisa rode down the sidewalk, neither training wheel was on the ground--she was riding solo! Brad took the training wheels off completely, and she's been zooming around ever since with hardly a spill. It was just a little sad to not get the joy of teaching her to ride a bike, but we sure are proud of her!

Meet Igor

Next year we will host Igor from Russia. He just turned 15 and seems like a wonderful young man. He loves sports, especially basketball (which makes Caleb happy!), and does very well academically too. We've talked to him on the phone several times, and his English is excellent, with a very cool accent, I might add.

He's coming through the Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX), which is funded by Congress and brings kids over from the countries of the former USSR. Out of the 50,000 kids that apply for the scholarship, only 3% are chosen.

We are very excited and eager to meet Igor in August.

Taiwan, here I come!

For AYUSA staff members, this is the height of our placement season. I've been incredibly busy (thus the lack of blogging!) looking for host families, making placements, and overseeing my Community Representatives, in addition to working with the students that are currently here.

Each year AYUSA organizes a trip for all the Regional Directors that qualify by meeting certain placement criteria. The trip is always to one of the countries we exchange with, and the staff stay with host families. This year's trip is to Taiwan, and I just qualified! I'm so excited! The trip will be sometime in the fall.

I'm also very much looking forward to next year's group of students, which is looking drastically different than the group we have this year. While this year's students have been nearly all Asian, I only have one Asian student placed for next year--a girl from Taiwan. The other students I've placed are from Germany, Brazil, Russia, Italy, and Tajikistan.

Our budding artist

Last Saturday I got all my exchange students together for a community service project. We helped run the Family Fun Fair sponsored by the Child Advocacy Center in recognition of National Child Abuse Awareness Month. I'd seen an article in the newspaper about the upcoming event, and many of my students still hadn't been involved in volunteer work, so I called and asked if we could help out. They were thrilled to get 15 willing workers, and put us to work manning game booths and serving food.

We also set up our own booth: a coloring contest for kids, complete with prizes. I found coloring pictures with an international flavor on the internet and let each child choose what picure they wanted to color.

I was also able to set up a table with hosting information and have already made one placement from the event. I have two more families that expressed interest in hosting and seven that want more information. So, I'd call the day a success!

We brought the extra coloring pages home and my kids have been enjoying them ever since. It appears that Elisa has some artistic abilities, which are improving quite rapidly. This is the picture she colored for me today.