July 11, 2011

For those three people who actually read my blog, you will have noticed I've been pretty absent lately. I've been getting used to life with a toddler, in the busiest time of the year for work (I work for myself so I can basically manage my own schedule), I spent a week with a queen size bed taking up my living room with an injured brother nursing back an ACL surgery, had my mother-in-law come to visit and currently have my parents back in town for a week or so.

While it's only been a short 5 1/2 weeks since Daniel came home, it feels like an absolute lifetime ago that we got the phone call that he was ready to travel.  As my blog posts have been pretty slim since the Asian Invasion, I'm going to spend some time catching you up.

The morning of July 11th, our phone rang. I wasn't expecting a phone call from our adoption agency. Our case worker was on the phone and gave me the happiest news in the world. She told us Daniel was ready to come home. This was such a huge surprise as I wasn't aware of Daniel being submitted for EP. For those of you in the Korean Adoption world, you know of the EP shortage in Korea. I stay on top of the various forums and boards for adoptive parents and I knew we still had another month of referrals ahead of us before Daniel's paperwork to come home to us would be submitted to the Ministry in Korea.  Our agency works closely with their Korean partner and was helping 4 of the Korean foster mothers and Eastern workers come over to the states for a heritage camp. That meant there were 4 laps available for children who were to be escorted to their forever families. I'm not sure of all that was happening behind the scenes, but someone much bigger than us had His guiding hands on Daniels file. Special permission was granted for him, along with three other little babies, to leave Korea and head home to their waiting families.

The next 9 days were a blur. My parents were coming out to Colorado for a quick visit and for my mother to attend my baby shower which was planned for the upcoming weekend. It was so helpful to have my mom here and be able to make lots of Target runs with me.

We had to keep the details of our travel call quiet for a while. It was so hard, I wanted to shout it from the roof tops. I was so excited and wanted to share all the news and details, however, our agency wanted us to keep it private. There are so many families who were waiting for their own travel calls. Posting on my blog or anywhere very public could have been perceived as hurtful and that's the last thing I wanted. Unfortunately, news spread and I still received several emails from other waiting families wanting to know how someone with a referral later than them got a TC earlier than then. It was sad, but I didn't let any angry people rain on my parade.

Dave and I went through the motions of finishing up whatever projects needed completing and enjoyed being a couple. We knew life was soon going to be majorly different than what we were used to. But, after almost 9 months of waiting, we were almost ready to head to the airport.