So what now??

Well, the adoption seminar went great!
It was super informative, 2 hours packed with all sorts of adoption Q & A. It wasn't a very big group... two other couples, one single woman, one woman without her husband, and us. One of the social workers has personally adopted from Korea and Guatamala.
Talk about great inside knowledge, right?!

We learned lots of interesting stuff. One of the other couples asked where the biggest need is.. domestic or international? They said that domestically, the only "need" is for children over the age of 12. Stuart and I are definitely not prepared for that!

As far as babies and children under the age of 4... they said that in the foster system, those children are usually adopted by their foster parents, should they become available for adoption. Its super rare for the foster parent to not choose to adopt a child that young. And in the U.S., adopting through a birth mother, Juno-style, is common. But they stressed, there isn't what they would classify as a "need". That's a "want"... as in, 'I want a newborn baby'. Not that there's anything wrong with that. There simply isn't the same need for adopting babies domestically as there is internationally.
"Need" is a relative term, though. All children need to be loved... I guess this is just a topic when you simply need to follow your heart..

And that leads us to Korea, where our heart and our baby is..

Since China was our focus for so long, we knew that a girl was pretty much a definite.
I guess we thought it would be the same in Korea..... well, maybe not..
It turns out that most people want to adopt girls, regardless of the country. Everyone simply wants a girl.
So, the need is actually for adopting baby boys.

The current wait time for adopting a Korean baby boy is 18 months... for girls, its 24-30 mos. Obviously, the longer wait time is a big consideration for us but its not a deal-breaker. If we truly had our hearts set on a girl, we would do it, without question.

You wouldn't think that it would be so hard to make that decision though... Boy or Girl?? Just shut up and pick one, right? No, its not that easy..
Its just not "normal" to get to pick, you know?? You don't get pregnant and think, "Hey, God! Hook me up with a little girl this time, would ya?"
I mean, you don't usually have a choice...
But we do... and that's a huge responsibility.

So, how do you pick? How do you say "Yes. I want a girl..." and know that by making that decision, we're passing up a sweet, baby boy? That's one of the main reasons we chose to adopt to begin with! Baby girls in China are continually discarded and disregarded simply because of their gender...

We had to ask ourselves... are we adopting a "picture" in our heads or are we adopting the baby who truly needs us?
So there it is...

We will place ourselves on the list for "no gender preference" but according to the case worker, she's 99% certain that we'll get a boy by not specifically requesting a girl.

So..... I guess, we're having a BOY! :)


Our focus, as of now, is our application. I'm working like crazy to finish my autobiography. Stuart is still struggling with his own. Then we have a lot more paperwork and document-collecting to do. We also want a certain amount of savings before we officially pass 'Go' on this adventure.
So we'll be sending our official application around the end of May.

That means, we'll hopefully have our baby before the end of next year... maybe by Christmas!!!

Wow, huh?
Wow...

Did I mention a baby boy?? :)
Yeah, wow.