Adoption Day!!!

It's now the end of September and our biggest news by far is that we went to court this morning to witness the judge finalizing Alexander's adoption. For people who aren't really familiar with the Korean adoption process, I'll briefly summarize things. When you adopt a baby from Korea, you actually bring the baby to Canada as a Permanent Resident through the same immigration process you'd use if you wanted to sponsor a family member from another country. Once the baby is here, your social worker does follow-up reports 2, 4 and 6 months following placement and it's only after that period has finished that you actually go to court for things to be finalized. Some families have to wait a long time for a court date, and some have their adoption orders signed by the judge without even appearing in court, but since we live in such a small community, the judge fit us into her schedule on very short notice and also allowed us to take some pictures!

We've put some photos in a new family photo album and included some pictures from this morning's court proceedings as well as some other pictures from the past month.

We saw my family to celebrate Anne's birthday in Toronto at Benihana and then spent the next day with our extended family celebrating two cousins' birthdays.

I've been doing a fair bit of scrapbooking if and when I have time, so it'll be nice to finish Alex's adoption scrapbook now that everything's finalized (it'll be the last page in the scrapbook and then I'm done!).

Another fun thing we were able to do was to celebrate Chu'sok, which is the Korean Thanksgiving/Autumn Moon Festival. This festival is based on the lunar calendar and is celebrated in different ways in countries like China and Vietnam. We integrated some Korean traditions by going to the gravesites of my family here in Cambridge and paying our respects. We then went and joined a group of other families with children adopted from China (and a few from Korea) and had a fun time playing in a park and sharing a pizza dinner before the full moon came up.

The next day, we got to spend a wonderful but bittersweet afternoon with Chris' family as we scattered his parents' ashes. It was great to see all of them, and we shared a lot of funny and sad stories about Chris' parents, so it was a really special day for all of us.

We had a lot of fun last weekend going to our monthly Seoul-Mates playgroup where a bunch of families who've adopted from Korea get together at different places for the kids to play and the parents to get caught up on things. It was so amazing to see all of the new babies, and also see how much the other ones have grown since we last saw them a couple of months ago. We included a couple of pictures of that gathering in the most recent family photo album here on the site.

We also go to share in the joyous homecoming of the newest son of friends of ours. They already have a little boy (another Alex) from Korea and this is their second adoption. Their son Derek came home on Wednesday night with two other beautiful babies so it was lots of fun at the airport - everyone was full of smiles and laughter and tears of joy and it was so nice to be able to share that special moment with our friends as they were there for Alex's homecoming as well as so much of our adoption journey.

We'll be sure to post more sometime soon as we've got lots of things planned this month with Alex's first Canadian Thanksgiving and his first Halloween!