A New Experience

Now that you are all caught up on how Joey and I met, I thought I would skip over the past four years, and move on to what's going on with us now. So Joey and I are in our fourth year of marriage, and we are still going strong! We have had a lot of ups and downs the past few years, and we have survived them all so far. We have a lot of things going on in our life right now that I would like to share.

In December, we will become a host family for a German student named Johanna. I can not be more excited to meet her, and learn all about her culture. Now you may be wondering why we are doing this, or how we even came to the decision to do it. (I get these questions a lot) Basically, ever since I have been in high school, I have always known that I wanted to host a foreign exchange student, and I would have loved it if my parents would have done it when I was still in high school. I never asked them too though, because I knew they would say no. I guess it isn’t for everyone, but I was determined to host ever since then. Now I know that you are probably wondering why I wanted to host still! Well, I had a friend in high school that was an exchange student, and she was from Germany. We became friends, and I was always intrigued by her differences, and just knew that when I was able to host, that I would.

Well, I started out the quest to host a year ago, almost two years ago, really. I got all the information, and was contacted by a representative from the agency, only to find out that you have to be 25 to host. I was 24 at the time. I was a little crushed to find that out, but at the same time, I figured if I had waited this many years, one more wouldn’t hurt. Well then this year, I started getting calls, and emails about hosting again, and after talking to Joey, he almost talked me out of hosting. We were at the time thinking about trying to get pregnant(which is a whole other blog in itself, lol), and then my sister moved in with us, and since we only have one spare bedroom, I decided that it was not the right time. After a few weeks, just as I had anticipated, things didn’t work out with my sister living with us, and she moved back home. We had decided to wait one more year to try to get pregnant, and were even planning on going on a cruise for our anniversary next year. Then all of a sudden all of those plans slowly turned around, and changed, and now I honestly can’t say that any of them are still in place! We are once again trying to get pregnant, and I finally talked Joey into hosting! We also decided that the cruise would not be a good idea either, because for one, I may be pregnant, or have a newborn, and two, we would have an exchange student. Some people may see both of those situations a hindrance to their life, but I am honestly happy to make the sacrifices, they are my own choices and couldn’t be happier with them.

So we finally decided for sure that we were going to host. We met with the area rep, and she interviewed us, and checked out our house, and we had to go through background checks, and give her references. After all that had been completed successfully and we had picked out a student, we found out that we had already missed the deadline for Columbia County, to have a student for a full year. The student that we had picked out was set up to come a full year. The agency that we are working with told us that we could host just for the spring semester, so we would get our student in December, and then they would leave in May. Neither Joey, nor myself wanted to limit the student that we picked to just coming for a semester, if she wanted to do a full year, so with the help of our area rep, we searched for another student. That’s when we found Johanna. She was setup to be placed outside of our region, so we had to get special approval for her. (In the beginning I was not really sure what it meant for her to be “outside of our region”) Now I have come to realize that the students must be able to chose where they want to go in America, because when we got all of Johanna’s information, her application stated that she preferred to be placed in Minnesota. Now I feel like I have passed up one student because we didn’t want her to be disappointed with coming for a shorter time, only to get a student that wanted to be placed somewhere else….



I have been communicating with her frequently through email, and she seems very excited, and interested to come. She has never once mentioned that she was upset to be coming to Georgia. She has sent pictures, and also tried calling once, unfortunately I was at work and wasn’t able to answer. We have about five months before she arrives, but I am already planning, and trying to get everything perfect for her arrival! I want to redecorate the bedroom, to be customized just for her, and we plan to take her to many different places, to show her as much of America as possible. We are still thinking of all the places that we can take her, and of course at the top of our list is going to a Braves game next year, and also going to Washington D.C. for spring break. I can only imagine what a teenaged girl from a completely different culture can expect, or what will make her stay enjoyable.







If anyone has any good ideas of what to show her while she is here, or also any tips for making her feel at home, even though she will be so far from home, I would be happy to hear your ideas! Also, if anyone is interested on getting more information on hosting, you can visit www.ayusa.org this is the agency that we are using, and haven’t had any problems. You can actually view student profiles on the site, and you can host students from almost any country! It seems as though it will be a great experience that we will all remember for a lifetime!

Meet Johanna!

God Bless the Broken Road

So here we are, Joey and I, dating, after only knowing each other for a few months. Through dating, we were pretty much inseparable. There wasn’t really a day that we went without seeing each other. One day we were going to the mall for some reason, that I can not remember (possibly because the outcome of that mall trip was far more exciting than what we were originally going for), and we decided to go to a few jewelry stores, and look at rings. It was truly a random thing, and not something that we had really talked about before. We had talked about our feelings for each other, and hinted around at marriage, but we never talked about it as if we were about to actually be married. However, after looking through a few different stores, we went to Helzburg. Well, they were absolutely the nicest and friendliest people that we had encountered all night. Well we looked at rings, and I tried pretty much all of them on, and then Joey looked at me and said “Let’s go ahead and buy one”. I was shocked, and at the same time, having trouble realizing that this was FINALLY happening! (I was only 20, but boy did all those years seem like forever!) Well he told me to get whatever ring I wanted, and I ended up falling in love with a set. So we began the process of purchasing the ring. The store was offering no interest until the next year, so we decided to finance it; well we hoped to finance it! The lady went and input all of our info into the computer, and came back and told us we were approved! So we took the rings and went home. So on the way home, I was wondering, “does this mean I am engaged now?’ I was hoping not, because even though I got to pick my own ring out, I had hoped to have a romantic proposal to go along with it! But before I could think of the words to ask Joey about this, he told me that he was going to hold on to the ring, until he felt it was the right time to ask me, and that way I would be surprised.

Well, that Saturday, Joey asked my dad to go golfing with him, so that he could ask for his permission to marry me. I knew that he was going to do that, but it was just so that when he was ready to ask me, he could. So Joey goes golfing with my dad, and I think he played the worst game in his life, because he was so nervous. My dad said he would go to ask him something, and then he would just say “never mind”. He eventually got up the courage to ask him, and of course my parents loved Joey, and had no problem with it. Later that day, Joey had to DJ a wedding. (He did it for an old friend, and occasionally did it for his friend that owned the karaoke business) Well the plan was to meet him after he got done with the wedding to go have dinner or something. So I got to his apartment, and waited for him. And waited for him, and waited even longer. The wedding ran later than he planned, which left me at his apartment with nothing to do, and not very happy about that. When he finally got home, I was not in a very good mood at all. He told me that he wanted to just go somewhere and get out of the house. So he took me to the savannah rapids pavilion, and we walked down the canal. Well, little did I know, that when we were back at the apartment, he asked me to get him something to drink so that he could get me out of the room and get the ring into his pocket, because as we were walking, he started telling me how much he loved me, and so on, and then got down on one knee, and asked me to marry him. Of course, I said yes! And he was even able to get back up, lol, not that he would be able to do that so easily these days. So here we were, officially engaged. I was surprised! And it was a lot sooner than I thought it would be! My anger from being home alone and him being late went away quickly, and we went to celebrate…. at IHOP. Of all places, we went to IHOP because I had never been there, and really wanted pancakes, and since it was so late, there were few choices!

So here we are in June of 2004, only been dating about a whole month, and we are engaged! We had a lot of firsts that year. Other than the ones I have already told you about, our next first, was our first trip together, which came about in July. We went to the beach with Joey’s family. I pretty much had met most of them, just not his brother and sister in law that lived in MS. Well, the trip was going pretty well, until the day of the cookout for the 4th. Joey and one of his brothers got into about something, and it just went downhill from there. We ended up just leaving and going downtown and watching the fireworks on River Street. It was quite the experience!

Over the next few months, the wedding planning started, and we eventually settled on our wedding date, May 28, 2005, a little less than a year away. Joey and I really never fought…. Until the planning started. Planning a wedding really stresses you out! But the time came, and the wedding went really well, and was completely worth all of the stress and hassle! We were both heading in completely different directions, we thought, but thank God, He crossed our paths. We had gone down so many broken roads, but they all were just leading us to each other.