Day 1: Let the Adventure Begin

Well, here we go. It's Saturday, February 20th at 6:20AM and we are about to go wheels up from Paducah, KY to Seoul, South Korea to meet our beautiful daughter Lola. 

We are flying from Paducah to Chicago (1ish hour flight) Chicago to Tokyo (13.5 hour flight) and then Tokyo to Seoul, South Korea (3.5 hour flight). We will then drive 1.5 hours to our hotel in Seoul. The total travel time is about 26 hours. To say that I am anxious about the travel is a bit of an understatement. While I have traveled internationally before, the 13.5 hour flight is my LONGEST flight to date. Casey on the other hand has been to Thailand for a couple of mission trips and his travel time was even longer than this, so he is an old pro! Anyhow, we loaded up on various sleeping meds, so hopefully they work! We will arrive in Seoul at 9:30PM Sunday, February 20th. It will be 7:30AM Sunday back home since Seoul is 14 hours ahead of us. 

This trip has been a long time coming! While our actual adoption process has moved fairly quickly, Lola has been prayed for LONG before we began the paperwork. Casey and I began dating 16 years ago when we were just babes, 15 and 17 years old. We have both had hearts for adoption for as long as we can remember. Fast forward to 10 years of marriage and 2 biological boys later and we were ready to grow our family again. God laid adoption very heavily upon our hearts and we knew that it was time. 

After meeting with several adoptive parents and doing lots of research we began the paperwork at the end of June of 2015 by submitting our application to our agency. We wanted a girl. Everything that we read about Korean adoption said that you could adopt a girl if you had two or more boys already. Check! ✅

Well....it turned out the rules had changed and you could NOT specify gender. You had to be open to either sex. Most people think girls are easier to adopt in Korea, but that is not the case. In Korea, most adoptions take place "in country". In fact, only 300 families were granted exit permits for children to be adopted internationally in 2015. Most of the girls get adopted because it is somewhat of a stigma for "boys" to have a different last name than their family. Girls eventually get married and their name will be different anyways, so girls usually just get adopted in-country unless they have special needs. 

So, after finding out that we couldn't specify gender, we prayed about it. We decided that we would accept either gender. If God wanted us to have a girl we would get a girl and if he wanted us to have a house of boys then we would get a boy. 

So...back to our application. We turned it into our agency and were told that we would need to complete a home study. Then, after the home study was completed (a process that usually takes 2-3 months in and of itself) we would hopefully get a referral 2-3 months later. So, we were looking at about 4-6 months to get a child referral. Well...we turned in our application June 26th and on June 29th we got a phone call saying that they had a referral for us AND it was a healthy GIRL!!!! We saw her picture and gosh....we just knew she was our child. Our hearts haven't been the same since. 

Next, we started on our homestudy. That was by far the part of the process that seemed to take the longest. I was so anxious wanting to get that completed and sent off to Korea. Every extra day it took was another day apart from my girl. After a couple of months of page upon page of paperwork, home visits, adoption prep videos and books, medical visits, psychological exams, and multiple edits to get the paperwork just right, our agency sent our paperwork off to our Korean agency, SWS. We were FINALLY Accepted to Korea (ATK) on September 25th, 2015. We waited and waited a few more months until we heard that our Exit Permit (EP) was submitted by SWS to the ministry (Korean government) on 11/26 and approved (EP approval) on 12/8. This probably doesn't mean much to most of you all but that is LIGHTNING FAST!!!!

The rest of the dates look like this:

Submit to court- 12/11

Notified of court date: 2/2

Court date: 2/26

So now we are here. Sitting in the Chicago airport. Our schedule for the week looks like this:

Monday- meet Lola at foster parents house 

Wednesday- get to visit with Lola at SWS

Thursday-Court Date -we have to show pictures of us meeting Lola and have to state that we do still want to adopt her. They will then ask us a series of questions about us, our homestudy, why we want to adopt, etc and then hopefully they will grant us prelim approval. 

Friday- come home. 

Well, my fingers are getting sore now from typing. I'm off to walk around a bit before we actually depart for this grueling flight. Thanks for following our blog and I hope you enjoy the ride. 

Oh and Here's a map in case you wanted to see where South Korea is exactly. 

And I've never been on an airplane with stairs.

 Erin