I am so excited to say that our home study is in the final round of revisions/signatures and nearly ready to send to Korea!  Along with our home study, we will also be sending our referral acceptance (ATK) paperwork.  Our agency is mailing it to us to sign/notarize this week, and then we will send it back to them.  I am cautiously optimistic that everything will be ready to go by the end of next week (since we are working across 3 states, there’s a lot of mailing back and forth to be done).

I wanted to answer a common question before I forget:

Q.  Does this mean he’s yours?  Can anyone else request him before the paperwork is signed?

A.  No, our agency was the only agency advocating for this child.  They only give one family a child’s file at a time, so there’s no “battle” between families for a baby (which I’ve unfortunately heard happens elsewhere).  When we said we would like to move forward with the adoption, they notified the Korean agency (ESWS) and we were considered “matched” pending paperwork.  The paperwork is the stuff mentioned above.

Still, there are two ways we would no longer be his adoptive family.  1)  We can technically change our mind at any time.  Generally, this would be because of an unplanned pregnancy on our end or finding out there are extensive medical issues beyond what we were told about initially that make us unable to parent him at the level he deserves.  2)  His birth mom will have the opportunity to change her mind at the end of this process before we are awarded custody.  We view both scenarios as highly unlikely.

To add to this, we have ZERO plans of changing our mind, but an unplanned pregnancy makes us no longer qualified to adopt by Korea’s standards due to the required age difference between children, so there’s that.

From the birth mom standpoint, we are simply commenting based on the statistics we’ve learned from our agency.  It’s statistically unlikely she would change her mind, but if she did, we know that would be a decision made out of love.  We would grieve the loss of this sweet boy we love from afar, but we do acknowledge this isn’t an easy decision for anyone, and she has every legal right to change her mind.

Our little boy is 9 months old today!  We got his first monthly update via email this morning, and we were very excited to see 4 new pictures and to learn he got his first tooth over the last month.   It’s a bottom one.  He’s also growing fantastically and looks super healthy and happy.  We didn’t receive any surgical updates, but his next follow up is coming up later this month, so we are eager to hear what his surgeon is thinking regarding further treatment for his medical issue.

I bought him his first little toys today for when we are approved to send a care package!  I am also eager to settle on his name soon.  We have it narrowed down, but we are still not in agreement on the final choice.

We played with sidewalk chalk today, so I couldn’t resist getting a quick photo to add to his little play photo album: