Comments on: France update – week 4, a full month

By: HHaricot

HHaricot — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:35:28 +0000

karina from en famille rang. they really are a nice organisation. it was the utterly perfect day to ring and Karina and Fabienne are so lovely . they rang sb today, pretty positive on the whole we discussed the phone call, bits and bobs, asked her to pass onto french family how happy we are with them, that SB has been well matched. that tho home sickness is sad, if it is just for a short while with the phone call, that it is not something we would see as failure, and having discussed with a variety of families, it is something that some of them had for the whole 6 months, so perhaps english families just better at showing home sickness and have lost that stiff upper lip! so not to be worried about it. [tho i wish she had been happier]. I do think we have a fab match for SB. [not sure if they read this blog, but a cheer if they do!]. V, the mum is really spending time with SB helping her with the language, and the other things we knew, friends, school, happy on the whole etc. I feel a lot happier . after next weekend, when I am working, we will think of moving the call to first thing sun morning where possible. SB has blogged – also cheering. I said that we never sound sad on the calls, always cheery, upbeat, and mostly about france.

By: Mich

Mich — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 00:46:40 +0000

Oh yes, it did affect us. Yet I’m sure the children are not similarly affected. We had photos emailed to us (P was mostly good at this and it helped massively, just as i know seeing happy pics of R in our blog helped them) so used them to ask C to tell us about the people in them and where and when they were taken. Easier calls if C talked to us about events and experiences rather than us talk to her about what we had been doing. .

By: Hharicot

Hharicot — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 16:59:34 +0000

Thankyou, that is a bit reassuring. We have 20 mins to 30. Not had any communication from French family. Hoping that means all ok in the meantime! I hate just one short call a week being it. as if it is tearful that’s the mood I am in for a whole week.

By: Mich

Mich — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 07:30:53 +0000

Clo apparently cried after every phone call. Sometimes during and would be reluctant to let us go. I found putting the phone down the hardest bit though so would get M to do it where possible except she would want me back and it wasn’t easy to get her to let me go :-(. I think we had overly long phone calls. That was after C requested no phone calls at all during the first month. I think we were at the end of the third week when P messaged me to say she thought C needed some home contact. Then we were weekly on C’s request and some calls were too long – nearly two hours. I looked forward to the calls and sort of didnt all at the same time as problems would be said to us that we had no way of dealing with. I think she just wanted a venting space. Only thing I did manage was R would go through all C’s things, reading her letters and looking at her photos and things went missing from her personal drawer. I had thought it was Maman doing tidying but realised C was right as R went through all our stuff here too. So I said I couldn’t complain or sort the problem other than sending both girls English boarding school tuckbox lockable trunks (can’t send something to just C!). That problem was sorted :-).