Three months since my last post and the waiting game seems to be coming to a fast and furious end. Is it even possible??? The whole journey has been the most trying experience for me, the most impatient person in all the land.

At 9:30 am this morning, I stepped into a meeting with my mentor and my coach. The meeting was focused solely on me and my career goals with immediate action steps to take away for the year. While this was going on, an email crept into John’s and my inboxes at 9:38 am with the subject line ‘COURT 11/21!’. Starting at 9:51 am, I received numerous calls and FaceTime attempts from John. I snuck a glance at my phone to confirm it was in fact John calling me with the persistence of the Mandarin speaking robocaller that’s been frequenting my cell phone for the last few months.

At 10:17 am, I sprinted out of my meeting to call John. We laughed, we fake cried, we noted the incredible coincidence that the court date is also my mom’s birthday. What an unbelievable morning! Our lives have been forever changed.

And now we’ll run around to sort out our travel plans, work schedules, and do some serious shopping. South Korea has a gift-giving culture and it’s considered polite to bring small gifts to several people who have been along for the ride on the other side of the world. These people can include the foster family, social workers, adoption agency staff that will act as our translators, drivers, etc. It’s really a small token knowing these people have and will make our final steps as smooth as possible.

And for right now, I’ll scour through the various paperwork we’ve received to go through the things we’ll need to bring for the girls and also things we’ll need to get from the foster families. In my mind, the more information we get the better equipped we’ll be.

I’m also very excited to put together a life book for the girls. It was a concept that was totally new to me based on my own experience. The objective is to document a lot of what’s been happening leading up to now from our perspective and also from theirs. We’d include plenty of pictures of their foster families, notes about their experiences to date, pictures of Korea and their homes, etc. I think it’s a very smart and sweet way to ease the transition for the girls (this will indefinitely be a traumatic experience for them and seeing familiar faces may be comforting). I also think it’s a great resource for when they’re older and have more specific questions about their adoption story.

It’s surreal knowing these perfect little humans are almost ours. We couldn’t be more lucky.

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