How Did We Come to This

We are K, L, and T. We live in the northeast part of PA. As many know, we are hosting a German boy this year. Many have asked us why. For those who don't know the story yet. My grandparents hosted 32 exchange students over the years. Yes, you are reading that number correctly. I grew up around exchange students. I was a few years old when they started and well into my 20's when they stopped. They doubled up quite a bit, so that makes it easier to get to the higher number of students. With this day and age of internet, I am still in contact with a few of them. My grandparents indirectly led us on this path. See, my grandmother passed away the end of 2008. My grandfather lived with my parents for a bit. When we took him back to his place, there were numerous messages from some of their exchange students. He forgot to let them know that she had passed away. That job fell on me. Well, I decided the best bet was to contact a couple central people. Their exchange student, Jose, worked for the exchange program that they used. He knew almost all of their exchange students. I knew that contacting him would lead to getting the word out a lot easier, and minimize my searching of Brazil. As a side note here, most of my grandparents' exchange students are Brazilian. I ran into a snag when my grandfather had no idea what the name of the program was that they used. I then decided to contact every program that I could find to see if Jose worked for their Brazilian counterparts. I heard back from an AFS rep. He checked and Jose didn't work for them. We talked a little bit, and that was that. Well, that's what I thought anyways. Fast forward to March of this year. I received and e-mail from the same rep. He didn't know if we wanted to do it, but if we wanted to host, he thought he had the perfect kid for us from some of what we had talked about. At first, I thought this was a crazy idea. Our son is 1 1/2 years. Did we want to jump into having a toddler and a teen in the house? I talked it over with my husband. We decided that pros outweighed the cons, and so we decided to do it. It should be an interesting time.