10 Months

I am almost hesitant to post an update as all information is likely to change from week to week.  As of right now, this is what I THINK is going on with the adoption.

I am thankful I can say there is finally movement.   Court dates are starting to be issued left and right.  I know everyone in the program is sitting on the edge of their seats hoping they court dates stay firm and we see people start to travel.  The last set of court dates were cancelled and adoptive parents were left in the dark for almost 2 months with no idea what was going on.

The first court date that I know of will be at the end of May and we are hoping we will get more concrete information after we see several of these trail blazer families go through this new process.  This is great news because no new cases have been completed since the new law went into effect last August so it will be wonderful if we see this stand-still come to an end.

As of now Korea is back to requiring families to appear in court.   I have heard that families will meet with their baby and pictures will be taken that will be added to the documents that go to the judge.  The family will appear in court and the court appearance will be 15-20 minutes (nice huh that they are requiring us to pay thousands of dollars in travel for a 20 minute court case).

It seems that families are being given the option right now to take 1 long trip or 2 short trips.

I have been told that some agencies are requiring families to leave after the court appearance and return after the 14 day reconsideration period.   I am hoping they leave it up to families to determine if 1 or 2 trips better suits them.    Our agency has yet to update us that the travel has even changed at this point. 

I was really struggling with trying to decide if we should switch to the China WC program for many days.   Part of me is thinking lets just wait this out and see what happens before we decide anything but the other part of me was fearful that we may get a referral while we are waiting and if that happened and I had to turn the referral down because we felt like we could not handle the travel I think I would be heartbroken.

I decided I needed to think about the worse case scenario and decide if I was ALL IN.  I have not heard anyone saying BOTH parents were going to be required to stay 4+ weeks and that was the situation we COULD NOT handle with Jeff's work.  Still with my phobia of flying I could not imagine having to get on that airplane 4 times probably without my children, and possibly 2 of these on my own, one of which I would be traveling with a screaming toddler who I just took from his foster mother (the only mother he has probably ever known). 

I think that is the worse case scenario and I feel like I have come to terms with that as an option and even though I DON'T want to do it - AT ALL - I can do it.  God is not going to let anything happen to me that is not in His will and I have to trust that if that plane goes down with me in it that is how I was meant to go.  (Geez I'm still shaking a little typing this out)  I seriously spent a sleepless night feeling pretty sure I could not do this LOL

If one trip is allowed and Jeff is in agreement I would prefer to take one long trip.  On Friday, I talked to the kids principal and was asking her more information around how it would work if the kids were off school that long.  She told me that what work was available could be given to us to take along.  E-mail was also another option for some work.  I told her we still were not sure if the kids should be taken out of school this long especially my son since he will be moving to middle school and she told me that both our kids do great in school and they would have plenty of time to make up the work when they got back from the trip.  She said, in her opinion, that they would learn so much more in Korea than that month they missed of school.   After she said that I thought I would look for furnished apartments and found some that could be rented weekly and the rates were reasonable.  It may even not be too much more to rent the apartment for the month than we would have spend on one week at a hotel.  

I am feeling pretty good about staying in the program right now and watching and waiting to see what will happen.  Hoping and praying we see people traveling in the next month.