Korea

It's finally official. It's been a long time since there's been an update because there's been a big change to our adoption plans and it's not something to just casually discuss. After much consideration we have switched our adoption from China to Korea due to the extensive wait in China. What had begun as a year and a half to potentially 2 year time line has now stretched to an unpredictable amount of time. So that being said we began to explore other options and moving our adoption to the Korea program once we as a family qualified for it, made sense.

The Korean guidelines differed from China in that we needed to be married for 3 years versus the 2 years required by China. For us we hit this milestone on September 4th. We met with our social worker this past week to update our home study and officially switched our paperwork over to begin again. Although we're very excited there is of course an element of sadness and frustration. But parenthood demands flexibility and this is just the beginning on our road of the unexpected.

Now that we have officially begun the process with our agency of participation with the Korean adoption program we are as eager as all of you to know when we will be matched with our child. According to Holt, our agency, it will take approximately 11 months once our home study is completed to be matched. Once we are matched with a baby it will take approximately 4-6 months for our paper work and the baby's paperwork to be processed for us to fly to Korea and bring the baby home.

The baby will be approximately 5 months old at family match. All children are fostered by a family and therefore are not in orphanage care which is excellent for early child development.

So now we wait for our home study to be submitted, we finish a few forms ourselves and wait...