No, no pregnancies or anything like that, but we’ve registered and applied to be a host family for a high school foreign exchange student next school year.  We’re looking at being matched with a young woman from Slovakia for an entire school year.  There’s still red tape and paperwork to get through, but luckily, we both already have our clearances thanks to Girl Scouts, so we shouldn’t have any trouble with that part.  Then the young woman gets to read our family and home description and decide if she’s willing to stay with us.

We’re looking forward to sharing our family and neighborhood with a foreign student and at the same time, hoping she can share information and tidbits about her culture with us.  We think it’s an excellent opportunity for cultural exchange, and especially for Daughter Person – she’s already asking us when her “big sister” is coming.  I’ve heard both great and not so great stories about hosting, but most have been either great or ambivalent, and we can survive almost anything for 10 months.  The program has a lot of support if we need it, both emergency and help figuring out solutions to issues, and we’re comfortable with the local coordinator’s ability to match students with host families that generally work together.

From a financial standpoint, we’ll be paying extra for food and gas (transportation), but the students come with $150-$250/mth of spending money, and their own health insurance.  We’ll also get to deduct $50/mth on our taxes as a charitable donation. Feeding a teenager may be more than the extra $100/mth we’re planning, but we’ll approach that as we come to it!

The slide and all – aka “the kit”

Having just moved into a brand new house, there’s not much to repair/improve on yet (There’s a large list of wants though!).  But, we now have a nice large yard, big enough to have both a deck and a swingset with some grass left over.  We’re saving up to build the deck next summer/fall, but we’re working on the swingset.  I got a ready-to-build kit (minus the wood) from Plan it Play for $879 (delivered!).  It provides the plans and all of the hardware for the swingset, as well as the swings, slide, rocks and rope ladder.  I’m sure I could have gotten the parts cheaper, but the slides are pretty darn expensive by themselves, and I really have no clue what I’m doing when it comes to a structural building that I’m going to trust my daughter’s life on.  I’ll pay a little more for vetted plans!

The parts arrived last week, and last weekend, I convinced my little brother to borrow his boss’ truck to haul 12′ long lumber from Home Depot (totally legit – he’s allowed to borrow it as long as he puts gas in it).

Hauling wood – my brother loves my daughter!

Home Depot didn’t have exactly what we needed for all of the wood, so we paid a little more for ground contact pressure-treated pine when we didn’t need to in some cases. They also didn’t have one of the sizes I needed in ground contact PT pine, so I picked up the last pieces of  wood with the RAV on my way home from work at 84 lumber (only need 70″ lengths, they only have 8ft lengths, but I fit them in RAV, so paid a little more there as well because of the waste).  About $410 in wood later, plus $130 for tools I didn’t have, like a hand router and roundover bit, we’re ready to begin building the swingset.  I’m going to be prepping the wood between now and Labor day weekend, and then several friends will be arriving that Saturday to help assemble it.  The plans estimate 15-16 hours of work, but I’m hoping I can cut that down on the weekend by pre-cutting, pre-rounding, and pre-drilling the bolt holes.

Most of the wood – ready to start pre-work

(Recycling only comes every two weeks, the packaging for the kit is waiting until this upcoming week to be broken down and recycled.)

We’ve never built anything structural or weight bearing before, so this will be our “practice” for the deck next summer.

Wish us luck!

We have to pick where we’re going to live in Pittsburgh over the next few months. We’re at least trying to decide what part of the city we want to be looking in so that when our house does sell, we’ll be ready to seriously look for something.

We were originally looking at the North Hills (North Allegheny school district), but after commuting for the last week and a half, I’m wondering if we shouldn’t live closer to my job – in Squirrel Hill (my job is in Oakland). I’ve been driving to a park and ride and then riding the bus in (the 61C), and it’s taking me about an hour each way. I leave before Daughter Person gets up in the morning, and I’m home in time to spend about 2 hours with her before she goes to bed. I’m used to getting up at 7:30, to be at work by 8-8:30 and then picking her up by 4-4:30pm. This long commute stuff may be for the birds. I have been taking the bus primarily because at my mom’s the bus takes the exact same route I would drive, it only takes about 5 minutes longer, and it’s free. Living in the North hills, I’d be driving every day, paying $87/mth for parking, and theoretically driving 30 minutes each way (I’m going to assume my co-workers are being generous and stretch that to 40-45 minutes each way). That kind of commute was fine – when I was single, and when I wasn’t a parent. Now, I want to get home to spend time with Daughter Person in the evenings – not sit on the bus or in the car all day.

We’ve talked about possibly buying in Squirrel Hill – the neighborhood just outside of Oakland where I work. I could walk it (about 20-30 minutes – biking is not an option because I’m very hill averse), or take any of 5 buses home – all of which seem to come more often than the bus I ride now. Tonight, the one bus I need to get home drove right past CMU without stopping because it was full – so I waited *another* 30 minutes for the next bus – something I’d rather not continue to do.

There are some advantages besides the shorter commute: a smaller home is easier to find, we’d be walking distance to a lot of great stuff – a grocery, a jewish community center, lots of restaurants, etc. But there are some serious downsides: the schools are crappy from what I’ve heard (especially compared to North Allegheny), and it’s in the city, with smaller yards and property. We’d pay 3% local tax instead of 1% local tax (comes out to about $4000/year). *But*, we’d likely get rid of one vehicle (and be able to get a 1 car garage instead of 2), and not paying gas or insurance on it – but that doesn’t quite match up to $4000/year difference (maybe $3000/year). We’d still have a car payment because we’d be keeping the car with the payment, but we wouldn’t be saving for a replacement car for a while.

The housing prices are within our price range, and in decent parts of town (except maybe the schools). The commute can’t be beat – and if we ever worked outside the city, we’d be right downtown and could get most places pretty easily.  We know this isn’t likely to be our “forever” house, so there are some compromises we’re willing to make.

Are we missing something major to consider? Does anyone have kids in the Pittsburgh Public Schools (Colfax K-8 and Alderdice High school) that would be willing to talk about them?