One month down, one or two to go

Today marks one full month since our P3 was sent to the Korea adoption agency, Eastern. Our agency is projecting that the wait is 2-3 months from the P3. So, that means we should be getting our travel call on or before Memorial Day.

I sure hope it's before. I have organized the heck out of everything in our house. You'd think we were moving from how clean our house is right now. And anyone who knows either or both of us that well knows that we are not typically tidy. Entropy may be more like it. I'm sure many people who have known us over the years could tell myriad stories about our systems of cleaning - putting spoons full of peanut butter in drawers or under the bed to hide them, or spreading everything out all over the floor then standing on the bed to find something.

If we don't get to travel soon I'm going to have to start breaking into my friends' and neighbors' homes to clean and organize simply as a way of keeping myself occupied. Do you think they'd mind?

On Tuesday another family from our agency heard that their child's visa interview had been scheduled. Their P3 was sent two weeks before ours. We have no idea if that means anything about our process, but at least we know Korea is still processing visas from our agency. It had been well over a month since the last visa for a family from our agency. That's enough to start all sorts of crazy thoughts.

Hope

Gosh, this rollercoaster is exhausting! One minute we are hitting bumps at the bottom of a hill and the next we are being pulled up to the top, cresting another hill waiting for that feeling of our stomachs flying up into our diaphragms. Whee!

Once a reporter, always a reporter. Being the closet investigator I have been following several blogs of other adoptive families across the nation, whose timelines closely mirror ours. Being with different agencies in Korea there are, of course, variations. Today I logged on to check to see if any of these families had heard anything, anything at all. And, there they were - several headlines screaming excitement about visas being issued. Hooray! I am so excited for these families. This wait can be excruciating at times.

Being just a tad behind many of these families I am full of hope today that we might be in one of the next few batches being processed - Korea files the paperwork required for the passports twice a month. Even seeing that others are seeing movement has me ecstatic. There is movement! We might actually still see our son in the next few months. Huzzah!

8 Months Old Today

Andrew turns 8 months old today. We had really hoped to wish him a happy day in person, but we are still waiting for the Packet 3 to come back from Eastern, so instead we send him our thoughts and our prayers hoping he's having a good day with his foster family.

Each day we wait gets harder and harder. Being parents to a little boy so far away is definitely not easy. On days like today it is heartbreaking to be so far from our little boy, to have his cries soothed by someone else no matter how great his foster parents are. We are his mommy and daddy and should be with our son. We should have been traveling this week, if everything had gone according to plan, but heard last week that we may still have as much as 2-3 more months to wait due to a backlog in Korea processing passports - the prerequisite to a visa and us being able to travel.

So, rather than packing or trying to buy plane tickets we are adjusting to the idea of being here quite a bit longer and bringing home a little boy rather than a baby. Today, Shawna is going to register for a fencing and a hip hop dance class, and maybe a tennis ladder, to help her bide the time over the next few months. Eric is working with a group he will be teaching classes for, and preparing for the test drive of the class next week.

In the meantime, Dixie and Ian have been practicing to be a good big brother and sister by sleeping in the crib and on the changing pad. They are wishing he was here so they could share some of their friendly, cat snuggles as only a cat can do.

Still waiting

Nothing new here. Still waiting on that Packet 3 to come back from the Korean agency. Should everything have gone well it should have come back a week or more ago and we should have heard last week or be hearing this week that Andrew's visa was issued and it is OK to bring him home.

But, alas, we are at the mercy of the Korean government, which seems to be moving at the speed of molasses right now. So, we wait and wait and wait. Last week we heard that we may have another 2-3 months to wait, which was distressing. Andrew is quickly leaving his babyhood and soon we will be packing up all of the baby things in favor of toddler things.