Jaden’s forever family day

In one hour we will be meeting Jaden and his foster mother at the social worker’s office to take Jaden home with us forever. October 1st will be Jaden’s “forever family” day. Each year we will celebrate his birthday as well as his forever family day. Well, actually we will celebrate every day of our lives with him, but especially those two days which hold special meaning for our family.

Our wait to Forever Family day

Yes, you are correct – we were not supposed to meet the foster mom at the social worker’s office until 1:30 p.m. today, but yesterday we received a call from the social worker around 4:00 p.m. asking if we would mind meeting them at 10:30 a.m. rather than 1:30 p.m.. When the phone rang in our room last night and I realized Rick was talking with the social worker, my heart sank thinking that the foster mom may have changed her mind and wanted to adopt Jaden herself. This has evidently happened in the past, according to some of the Korea adoption blogs, but in the only case I heard of firsthand, the foster family decided to keep the baby before the adoptive family made the trip to Korea. Even though I thought it couldn’t really happen at this point since we are here — you never know—so needless to say I was holding my breath until I heard that the call was only to ask us to arrive early. Whew-

So now we are all ready, waiting for 10:15 when we can walk down the road to the social worker’s office. I cannot wait until I am holding Jaden in my arms again. I am sure it is going to be very, very difficult, after seeing how upset the foster family was when we were there on Monday. I pray that Jaden adapts quickly and that it isn’t too hard a transition for him.

We are planning to come back to the Guesthouse right after we pick him up, to give him time to get used to us before we decide to do any further sightseeing. We’ll see how it goes, but I wanted to blog now before we pick him up since I’m not sure what my chances for blogging will be like later.

Yesterday we took our biggest risk yet while here in Seoul and got on the subway to go to the CO-EX mall. The subway is immaculate – it seriously looks brand new and is cleaner than any public transportation I have ever seen.  Mom said it reminded her of London. It turns out that once we figured out which direction we wanted to head in (not an easy task), and once we found the ticket booth that allowed us to speak to a real person, we were fine. When you get on the train, the station names are given in “English” (which is really the English translation of hangul – it is still Korean, but written with our alphabet rather than with hangul letters) so it is relatively easy, as long as you know where you are going, to find your way around. The underground tunnels are amazing; when you get off of the train at your station, there are 5 or 6 different exits to the ground level, depending on which way you want to go and where you want to end up. We walked around the mall for a few hours, picked up some souvenirs, and had lunch at – believe it or not – TGI Friday’s. I had the Seafood Kimchi Rice Pilaf. Mom, Dad, and Neville had more western fare. The kimchi rice was good – definitely not too spicy – so it is westernized nonetheless.

We walked back to the guesthouse from the mall since it was such a beautiful day and really less than 1.5 miles away. We had planned to go see the Buddhist temple (one of the many) this morning, but now we have better plans. We’ll see how we do with Jaden this afternoon, and if all goes well maybe we’ll do some more sightseeing on Thursday.

Until then, have a great Tuesday evening, and a terrific Wednesday!