Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Awesome August!


Well, August has been quite awesome for our family. We temporarily adopted two German exchange students for the month. Our new daughters, Amelie and Lena, were a wonderful addition to our family. We were very lucky to have such nice girls stay with us. They were sweet, kind and very fun. They fit in fabulously with our family. Lena played Wii with Caeley and Ryan and even seemed to enjoy Karaoke too! She watched Jane Austen movies with me and loved to read. Amelie was very fun too! Ryan treated her just like his other sisters. She would read to him and she spent quite a bit of time taking pictures of him and Caeley on her computer then making funny stretchy faces. Of course, Ryan would never want to stop and she was very kind to assure him they would do it again. She seemed to love the pool and even played Ryan's game of "Marco Polo" and "Colors".

Amelie and Lena were here to learn the "American Culture" and work on their english. I never knew that Americans actually had a "culture" but I guess America is different than other countries. The girls got to see the usual tourist places like Disneyland, Universal Studios, Magic Mountain, Downtown L.A., Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the Ocean. They really seemed to enjoy the ocean. We had plenty of really, really warm weather for them and they seemed to just soak it up. The girls enjoyed all of the food that they ate and they seemed to really like my homemade "egg Mcmuffins" and breakfast burritos. I laughed at how much they also liked cold cereal and seemed to enjoy mixing Captain Crunch and any other cereal I had in the cupboard.

We went to Sams Club (they were shocked at how MUCH there was), the Drive-in Theatre, Huntington Beach, and Bob took them to Universal City Walk, Hard Rock Cafe - for Amelie to add to her Hard Rock shirt collection, Ed Hardy for Lena and Mulholland Drive so that they could take pictures in front of the Hollywood sign.

It was an enjoyable 4 weeks with them. We enjoyed eating the "Haribo" and Chocolate that they brought to us. I even tried to make something out of the cookbook that Amelie gave me, "cucumber salad." They also gave us some wonderful books showing pictures of where they live and what the country and industry is like. After seeing those pictures, I wondered why would they ever want to come to California during the summer when it is HOT, brown and dry! In spite of all of that, they loved being here and we loved having them with us. Now we need to save pennies to go to Germany some day. It was a great experience and we have two wonderful new friends that we will remember forever. Thank you Amelie and Lena for staying with us and letting us get to know you.


3 comments:

Kathy Habel said...

What a fun experience for you and them.
BTW - Kim it looks like your two oldest are both taller than you now ;-)

The Importance of being Allen said...

yes, they are but that is not too hard because I am only 5'2".

Whimsy said...

What a great time! Makes me jealous. Perhaps we'll get down there in the next while so we can be tourists?