Happy Holidays

This holiday season we have continued to take part in all of our traditional family activities. We pulled out the ever growing box of holiday books, visited Meijer Gardens, and bought raffle tickets to win a Christmas tree at Chesaning's Festival of Trees event (we have done this for years and have never won. As tradition would have it, this year was no different). We did notice some new things this year though... At Meijer Gardens, Brian took a picture of Elly and I in front of the Korean themed tree. I got excited when I realized that there might be a Korean tree. Ironically, as I was telling Brian that we needed to look for the tree, we found it standing right behind us. We also noticed that our local tree farm has a Korean fir as one of its varieties. We missed the hay ride heading toward the part of the farm where the Korean fir trees were grown and it was much too cold that day to back track, but it is definitely something we will remember to check out next year. Happy Holidays!

**At the end of this month it will be 6 months since the completion of our homestudy.

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

Happy Halloween

Halloween was so much fun this year! Elly had special activities at
school and a party at her babysitter's house. We had pizza
and went trick-or-treating with neighborhood friends.

As you can see Elly was a Michigan State cheerleader. She finally narrowed down her costume choice about a week before Halloween. Hot Dog, Bee, and Witch all made it to her short list. She has already decided that she wants to be a Frog next year.

Harvest Day

Harvest Day is like a holiday in our family. Everyone gathers and picks the pumpkins from my Grandpa's pumpkin patch. Then we eat a variety of soups and other seasonal goodies. The kids enjoy tractor rides and guessing how many pumpkins we picked. This year it was close to 800!! In the late spring my Grandma gave each family a seed to see who could grow the biggest pumpkin. When Elly visited our pumpkin she would sing it a song and give it a hug to make it grow. Despite this effort, our pumpkin was the runt of the bunch.

I have recently been reading about Korean holidays. Interestingly, in Korea one of the biggest holiday celebrations is the Harvest Moon Festival (Chuseok). This is a holiday where families visit their hometowns and enjoy traditional foods. It is fun finding connections and similarities between the two cultures.

First Day of School

Elly was so excited for her first day of school! She woke up extra early and skipped her typical morning routine of juice and Arthur. She was especially upset when I delayed our departure for a quick photo. Elly has been going to daycare since she was 5 months old, but it was still difficult to see her walk into the school building with her backpack on.

Summer is coming to an end

While there are still a few weeks of summer left it feels like fall is fast approaching. Elly is signed up for preschool and we have purchased a new backpack and some school clothes. It was so fun watching her pick out her backpack. She wore it to daycare today and acted like such a big girl. We have also signed her up for dance class. I don't know who is more excited Elly or me. She looks so cute in her new tap shoes!

As for the adoption process our next step is to receive a referral. A referral means that we are matched with a child. It is still a long wait, but it seems strange to just be waiting for a call out of the blue. I find myself wondering if our child has even been born yet. Going back to work in a few weeks will be a nice distraction.

I Think I Need Reading Glasses!

We have been inundated with books, articles, magazines, etc. Here are the books we are currently reading....

Homestudy Completed

We have finished our home study! It feels really good to have that step completed. We now need to submit paperwork to immigration. It was really strange receiving mail from the Department of Homeland Security! We also need to send in pictures of our family & house to our agency and finish a few other small things. Now we wait....

Mommy are You Having a Baby?

Elly asked this loaded question at the beginning of the week. She has figured out that our social worker(a.k.a The Worker Guy according Elly), is talking about babies. For those of you who don't know Elly very well, she is infatuated with babies and has recently decided that she wants a "real" baby. So far we have affirmed her notion that The Worker Guy is going to help us get a real baby. Since then Elly has quickly generated a list of things we need to care for a new baby. The first thing on the list was socks! It has been so much fun seeing her excitement and for the first time it feels like we are going to have a baby. The hard part will be having her realize that she will be four or five years-old when the child joins our family. Please check out the pictures of Elly choosing toys for the baby. The two toys she picked now reside in the spare bedroom.

Starting the Home Study!

We have our first meeting with our social worker scheduled for May 15th to start our homestudy. We are excited and a little nervous. We need to meet with him 4 times over the course of 4 weeks. The report our social worker writes up from our study is a key piece of information to moving the adoption process along. Wish us luck!!

FAQs

We should be hearing from Family Adoption Consultants (FAC) any day now regarding our application. In the mean time we thought we would post some information about things we get asked about most often.
~We have a long wait ahead of us. It will be approximately 15-20 start to finish.
~We have requested a boy, but I have heard some talk that you can no longer choose a gender.
~We have decided to travel to South Korea rather than use an escort.
~Our child will probably be 9 to 12 months old.
~We chose South Korea for many reasons. Some of the most prominent were because of the stability of the program, good medical care, and the children are in foster care.

1st Post

At the request of several friends, we have finally done it. We have started a blog. This is something I never thought I would do. It does appear to be a great way to update everyone about the status of our adoption. We are still not really sure how this blog thing works, but I think readers can leave us messages in the "comment" links after each post. We would love to hear from you!

Right now we are waiting to hear from our agency regarding our formal application. When we hear back from them I anticipate being assigned a social worker and to begin the home study process. We will update our blog as things begin to happen. Right now it just feels so good to have that application out of our house! For several reasons it took longer than we anticipated to submit it. It felt crumby to feel like we were the ones delaying the process, but now the ball is in our agency court.

We have decided to adopt!

Many of you have heard us talk about the possibility of adoption for over a year now. We spent last summer researching agencies and in August submitted our preliminary application to Family Adoption Associates in Kalamazoo. Because of changes in the Korean adoption program the agency holds prelimary applications until they able to proceed with the adoption process. In January we received our formal application and submitted it to the agency in April. We are happy to share this process with our family and friends. Please check in to see where we are in our journey!

Love,
Brian, Mandy & Elly