New year, same story

If it’s January, that must mean it’s time for the annual “Starving of the Exchange Student Exhibition.” Get you tickets for the spectacle now!

We are currently hosting our 13^th foreign exchange student…a string that started when we began hosting in West Virginia when son&heir was only four. We’ve had boys and girls from several different countries, sometimes two at a time, stay at our house for the school year.

The story is always the same come January, though…”Holy crap, I’ve gained 30 pounds (or more) since I’ve been here and now the New Year reminds me that I will have to return home in a few short months.” What follows now will be a couple months of extra trips to the YMCA, skipped meals and self-flagellation over allowing themselves to balloon like the blueberry girl on Willy Wonka after partaking of the sumptuous Rantmeister vittles.

To be fair, this annual ritual is much more pronounced in the female exchange students than the males we’ve hosted. In fact, the only being thus far immune to the effects of the Rantmeister’s larder was a boy from Hong Kong we hosted in 2000. This boy ate more than anyone I have ever seen, twice as much as any other family member, but remained at his 5-10 and probably 125 pounds throughout his stay. I swear that boy must have had an entire bellyful of tapeworms to process that much food without adding weight.

Yesterday’s trip to Wal-Mart (Den of Unspeakable Evil) saw my cart loaded with more fruits and veggies than normal (ever the conscientious host parent.) We’ll probably also cut back on our trips to the buffets for a couple months to aid our current student in her efforts to again shoehorn herself into her jeans.