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Less than 24 hours until I’m in the air on the way to Korea! What could be more exciting then that? In 51 hours I will be meeting C. I can’t believe it. This whole process started to feel very theoretical in the past few months, and now that things are actually happening I don’t even know how to wrap my head around it. I think we are both a little nervous/anxious about what that first meeting will hold.
We have such a strong desire to run up to our little boy and give him a huge hug with tears of happiness streaming down our face. Reality will probably look very different. We have to earn C’s trust, and although we aren’t above bribery to get him to come hang with us during that first meeting (mylar balloon and snacks are currently at the top of our list), he might hesitate and gauge his foster mother’s reaction before approaching us. He could cry, he could be giggly and happily, he could be completely apathetic towards us. The unknowns are what we obsess about and (over)analyze right now.
We still don’t know if we are getting more than one meeting, thus we don’t know if we are officially taking custody on the 19th or not. You can be praying that we will have two meetings, not only for our sake but for C. I think it will help ease him into the “big change,” and it will give the two of us time to decompress afterwards and talk about how we will best be able to meet his needs in the first 48 hours.
Assuming we don’t get C immediately we have plans to tour the DMZ on Friday and go to a baseball game with some other adoptive parents families who will be in Seoul at the same time. We have booked a food tour, which I’ve heard is awesome, with two other couples for Sunday morning. We will get to experience the food and culture by traversing through the alleys of Insadong for some local cuisine. Rick Steves always talks about Europe through the back door; I think this might be close to Seoul’s equivalent.
We have been pretty busy this week getting ready to go, but I think if we would have left 48 hours after receiving travel call we still would have been ready. It is my theory that you will fill in things to do for the amount of time you have.
Next time I post it will be in Seoul!
J and I thought that since C will be very used to the tastes and smell of his FM’s cooking we should probably begin to cook more Korean food at home. So far we have only made bulgogi from scratch twice, and it was quite a bit of work to prepare. We began to rely on the T*rader Joe’s pre marinated bulgogi as our one Korean staple dishes, but since I received a Korean cook book for Christmas I suggested that we cook a few Korean dishes each month until travel call. This might be a lofty goal for us, but we started off the month strong by picking a dish we thought we could both enjoy. I am not a particularly adventurous eater, so we definitely played it safe with this stir fry dish. The cookbook romanizes the dish’s name as goongjoong tteokbokki.
We stuck pretty closely to the recipe, and it took about 30 minutes to prepare the meat and cut the vegetables. As we began to heat the sweet soy sauce which the vegetables and meat would cook in our whole house began to smell like a Korean restaurant. The aroma was very strong, and I think we were both a little worried how the final product would taste. Once it was time to actually cook the stir fry it went very quickly. We both sat down to the table and were very happy with the final product. The meat was tender, the vegetables weren’t too soggy and weren’t too hard, and the taste was quite good. Hopefully we can keep this trend going at least a few times a month until we travel to Korea.
Hearts and Seoul 