The Next Step

We just realized that we left a whole paragraph out of yesterday's blog! We were having great difficulty copying the text from Word and formatting the photos, so we negelcted to realize that we left out all the details about what happens next. (Thanks to Kevin's dad for pointing that out to us!)

The next step is to complete an acceptance packet (South Korea's form of a dossier), file an I-600 with USCIS requesting a visa for Joon, and wait for South Korea to issue a passport and a permission to emigrate form. Our agency estimates that this could take anywhere from 3-5 months.

We just received the acceptance packet via FedEx yesterday, so we are ready to sign all the forms and get our end of the paperwork completed (no reason for us to hold up the process any!). Some of the forms have to be notarized, but we just found out that a good friend from church is a Notary Public so we are excited to have her help us with this next step of our journey.

Once our paperwork is turned in, then our agency (CHSFS) and the agency in South Korea take care of sending the documents to the correct government offices in each country. When all the travel documents are issued, we will receive a phone call from CHSFS and then we get to pick up our son. They ask that we travel within 2 weeks from the phone call, so the last few weeks are just as unpredictable as a pregnancy! We are hopeful we could travel as early as March or as late as May, but we have learned early on in this journey that estimates are indeed just estimates!

Right now, Joon is living with his foster family in Seoul and the agency is also in Seoul so the visiting and official ceremonies will all happen there. We technically only have to be in the country for 3 business days, so with travel the trip could take as little as a week. However, we would like to do some sightseeing, including traveling to Busan where Joon was born, so we anticipate extending our trip a bit longer. We would like to take some pictures and get some momentos for Joon so we can tell him about where he spent the first few months of his life. The hard part is that we don't actually get to take Joon with us until the day we leave the country so any sightseeing is just prolonging our opportunity to get to know our son. We will try to find a good balance between learning about his birth country so we can teach him about his heritage as he grows and fulfilling our desire to hold him in our arms and start bonding with him.