Today we took Clarissa to church for the first time! We usually go to church every week, but between Josh being sick and wanting to give Clarissa time to adjust to us before introducing her to the world, we haven't gone for a few weeks.
I have a whole closet full of cute dresses for Clarissa that I've been dying to have a reason to dress her up in and today was the day! :) Before we left for church I took a few quick photos and I'm completely in love with how they turned out. I took a photo of Clarissa and the boys and I think it's my new favorite photo!
http://www.dropshots.com/Wenders11#date/2009-11-08/18:41:20
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Korea Revisited, Part 2
I have my laptop back for the time being, although I'm still having power problems, so I thought I'd better hurry and make another Korea story post before it goes back out again. It turns out it's not the cord that is the problem, it's the power port in my computer, which means I'm going to have to take my laptop in to have the port replaced. Bummer. For now it's working sporadically, so we'll see how long it lasts.
In Clarissa news, she learned how to clap yesterday and we've been playing pat-a-cake over and over and over all day. She loves it and it cracks me up to watch her do it. When we get to the "throw it in the oven" part she throws her hands in the air and gets a big grin on her face and it melts my heart every single time. She could not possibly be any cuter. :) I'm going to try to get her new trick on video soon.
OK, so now onto my Korea stories! I have so much to talk about! I left off at the end of the first night in Korea. Day two in Korea was even more eventful!
But before I go on, I have to post the photos of the fancy hotel toilet! I mentioned the fancy toilet in one of my posts while we were in Korea. It may have been our lack of sleep, but we were ridiculously amused by the fancy toilet in our room. It had a panel of buttons on the wall you could push to make the toilet perform fancy toilet tricks. The seat was also heated, which is always enjoyable. :)
Also, while I'm at it, here's a photo of the view outside our hotel window.
After being up for over 24 hours on our first day in Korea, we finally got back to our hotel and slept. I've never been so happy to sleep in my entire life!After a fantastic nights sleep we woke up the next morning ready for the biggest event of the trip-it was time to meet Clarissa!!
Our meeting at the agency was at 10am and Jin-Ha was nice enough to pick us up at our hotel and take us to the agency. Just getting to go to the adoption agency was amazing. I've heard so much about it over the past two years and I've seen pictures of it, so getting to FINALLY be there in person was awesome.
The agency is in a tall skinny building on a busy street. We walked in the front door into the reception area and a nice women sent us upstairs where our first meeting would be. We talked to our social worker for a minute and she got us settled in a cozy meeting room with couches and bookshelves and toys. It felt like a little living room.
My stomach was SO nervous at that point!! What a big moment! A few minutes later the door opened and in walked the foster mother holding the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. She had on jeans, a pink shirt and the cutest pink hat ever! She looked really nervous to see us and I'm sure she was wondering what the heck was going on! It didn't help that I took one look at her and burst into tears, lol. I'm sure she wondered who the crazy crying woman was.
We sat down and Clarissa stayed with her foster mother at first. The social worker sat with us and talked to us for a minute while Clarissa warmed up to us. She told us a little about Clarissa's time with the foster family and finally the foster mother handed her over to us.
Holding Clarissa for the first time was like a dream. I just kept kissing the top of her head! She was pretty nervous with us at first. She kept looking at her foster mother and then back at us. After a few minutes she decided that she wasn't sure she liked us and she started to get fussy. I expected that and it was OK, I handed her back to the foster mother for a few minutes. We definitely didn't want to overwhelm her.
The meeting took about an hour and in that time we took turns holding Clarissa, we talked to the social worker who translated for the foster mother all the things we needed to know about Clarissa. She told us what Clarissa ate and what her sleep schedule was like and all of that. Honestly, a lot of that first meeting is already a blur to me. I was SO happy to finally be seeing Clarissa that I wasn't paying attention to everything going on around me! I don't remember a lot of what was said in that meeting.
OH!! I can't believe that I forgot to tell this story!! I'm off on a tangent, here we go! A few months ago when I first started talking to Jin-Ha online I mentioned to her that I wanted to learn Korean so that I could thank the foster mother when I met her. After all she's done for us, the least I could do was thank her in her own language.
So Jin-Ha told me to write down what I wanted to say and then she translated it for me and helped me learn to say it. It was five sentences and I practiced it a TON. Basically what it said in English is this: "I was very nice to meet you. Thank you for taking such good care of Clarissa, you are very special to our family. We will raise Clarissa to be proud of her Korean heritage and I hope that we can come back to Korea to visit soon." That's easy enough to say in English but much trickier in Korean when you don't speak the language!
I practiced my little speech in Korean a million times. I practiced it at home, I practiced it in the airport, I practiced on the airplane, I practiced in the hotel and I practiced in Jin-Ha's car on the way to the agency. It was so important to me to say thank you to the foster mother in Korean, but I was so worried that I would get nervous and mess it all up!!
Fortunately when the time came, I didn't mess it up. At the end of the first meeting I told the social worker that there was something I wanted to say to the foster mother in Korean and then I gave my little speech. I was SO nervous but I pulled it off! Jin-Ha says that my Korean pronunciation is good, so I'm pretty sure the foster mother understood me. I hope what I said made sense! She seemed to really appreciate it and I'm SO glad that I did it. It's also really fun to say my Korean speech and pretend that I speak Korean, lol. I sound pretty convincing for those five sentences!
All too soon the first meeting was over and it was time to say goodbye to Clarissa for the time being. The social worker thought that Clarissa seemed nervous enough around us that she thought we needed to schedule a second meeting for later in the week. That was fine with us, of course, but the problem was that the only time they could do the second meeting was the day we were supposed to be going to Clarissa's hometown to do a tour of the hospital she was born in, so we needed to do some rescheduling.
There is a branch office of the adoption agency in Clarissa's hometown and a social worker was planning to meet us at the train station and take us to the hospital and it turned out that the only other time she could do it was that day. So the social worker told us to get down to the train station quickly and get ourselves down there. We were off on another adventure!!
So we said goodbye to Clarissa, jumped in Jin-Ha's car and we were off to Seoul Station, which is the big train station in Seoul. It was about 11:45 by that point and we were trying to make the noon train. Unfortunately we missed it by about two minutes.
So we bought tickets for the 1:00 train and Jin-Ha took us out to lunch while we waited. Seoul Station is attatched to a department store and to Lotte Mart, which is Korea's version of Target or Walmart. There was a food court there where we ate. Again it was one of those places that we never would have gone without Jin-Ha because we would have had no clue how to order or even WHAT we were ordering!
It was a food court similar to what you would see at a mall in the US, but there was one central cashier where everyone places their order that services all the little food places and then you sit down and wait for your order number to come up on a big board on the wall and when you see your number you go to the food booth and get your food. We would NEVER have figured that out on our own!! It was hard to decide what to eat when everything looked completely foreign and I had no idea what anything was, but we chose something that looked sort of like bulgogi (my favorite Korean food!) and it was delicious!
At a quarter to one we said goodbye to Jin-Ha and we boarded the train for our long ride across Korea. Clarissa was born in a coastal city called Busan, which is on the complete other side of the country from Seoul. Busan is the second largest city in Korea next to Seoul. By car it's about a six hour drive but by train it's just under 3 hours. So it was already 1:00 in the afternoon and we had a three hour train ride ahead of us to Busan and then three hours back in the evening so we knew we were in for an extremely busy day.
The train ride to Busan was actually pretty cool. Getting to travel all the way across Korea was an amazing experience. It was neat to look out the window and get a view of what Korea looks like outside of Seoul. There were lots of fields and trees and farmland along the way. I enjoyed the ride.
When we got to Busan we were met by a social worker who was super nice, but it was 4pm on a Friday and I could tell that she was kind of ready for her workday to be over. Because the trip was so rushed and last minute that day, we really didn't know exactly what to expect or what we'd be doing in Busan, so I really didn't know what our plans were with the social worker. I kind of hoped that maybe we'd get to sit down with her at the agency or somewhere and ask all of our questions. We did ask some questions about her birth mother and the circumstances of Clarissa's birth while we were on the way to the hospital, but I just really wasn't sure what was OK to ask and I didn't feel like I was prepared or if the car was the best place to ask my questions. I thought there'd be more time to talk later.
We got to the hospital and a nice women at the front desk took us all up to the 5th floor, where the maternity ward was. Being in the hospital where Clarissa was born was really emotional for me. I just kept imagining her birth mother and I kept thinking about what she must have gone through while she was there and it was really overwhelming to me. The woman who gave us the tour was SO nice. She took us back to labor and delivery, showed us the room that Clarissa was born in and the nursey where she spend her first few days. It was really interesting to see a Korean hospital. It was really quite similar to what you'd see here, just a little more basic. There is good healthcare in Korea and it didn't look like a bad place to give birth.
But again, I just kept feeling Clarissa's birth mother so strongly when we were there. I felt like I was walking in her footsteps, retracing everything she'd gone through and it was so emotional for me. I know from talking to the social worker that she didn't made the decision to place Clarissa for adoption lightly. I know it must have been so hard for her and my heart hurt for her while we were there. Thinking about her leaving that hospital without her baby broke my heart. I have nothing but love and respect for Clarissa's birth mother.
But getting to see where Clarissa was born was also really neat and exciting. It was a long and exhausting trip to Busan, but I will always be SO glad that we went. I'll never have to wonder what Clarissa's first few days were like. Someday when Clarissa asks I'll be able to tell her all about it and pull out photos, and I'm grateful for that.
And speaking of photos...
We didn't learn a lot of specific information about Clarissa or her birth mother at the hospital, but just getting to be there and see where she was born was a really special experience for me. I felt like I was just trying to memorize every detail and every second of our experience there so that I can tell Clarissa all about it someday.
In Clarissa news, she learned how to clap yesterday and we've been playing pat-a-cake over and over and over all day. She loves it and it cracks me up to watch her do it. When we get to the "throw it in the oven" part she throws her hands in the air and gets a big grin on her face and it melts my heart every single time. She could not possibly be any cuter. :) I'm going to try to get her new trick on video soon.
OK, so now onto my Korea stories! I have so much to talk about! I left off at the end of the first night in Korea. Day two in Korea was even more eventful!
But before I go on, I have to post the photos of the fancy hotel toilet! I mentioned the fancy toilet in one of my posts while we were in Korea. It may have been our lack of sleep, but we were ridiculously amused by the fancy toilet in our room. It had a panel of buttons on the wall you could push to make the toilet perform fancy toilet tricks. The seat was also heated, which is always enjoyable. :)
Also, while I'm at it, here's a photo of the view outside our hotel window.
After being up for over 24 hours on our first day in Korea, we finally got back to our hotel and slept. I've never been so happy to sleep in my entire life!After a fantastic nights sleep we woke up the next morning ready for the biggest event of the trip-it was time to meet Clarissa!!
Our meeting at the agency was at 10am and Jin-Ha was nice enough to pick us up at our hotel and take us to the agency. Just getting to go to the adoption agency was amazing. I've heard so much about it over the past two years and I've seen pictures of it, so getting to FINALLY be there in person was awesome.
The agency is in a tall skinny building on a busy street. We walked in the front door into the reception area and a nice women sent us upstairs where our first meeting would be. We talked to our social worker for a minute and she got us settled in a cozy meeting room with couches and bookshelves and toys. It felt like a little living room.
My stomach was SO nervous at that point!! What a big moment! A few minutes later the door opened and in walked the foster mother holding the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. She had on jeans, a pink shirt and the cutest pink hat ever! She looked really nervous to see us and I'm sure she was wondering what the heck was going on! It didn't help that I took one look at her and burst into tears, lol. I'm sure she wondered who the crazy crying woman was.
We sat down and Clarissa stayed with her foster mother at first. The social worker sat with us and talked to us for a minute while Clarissa warmed up to us. She told us a little about Clarissa's time with the foster family and finally the foster mother handed her over to us.
Holding Clarissa for the first time was like a dream. I just kept kissing the top of her head! She was pretty nervous with us at first. She kept looking at her foster mother and then back at us. After a few minutes she decided that she wasn't sure she liked us and she started to get fussy. I expected that and it was OK, I handed her back to the foster mother for a few minutes. We definitely didn't want to overwhelm her.
The meeting took about an hour and in that time we took turns holding Clarissa, we talked to the social worker who translated for the foster mother all the things we needed to know about Clarissa. She told us what Clarissa ate and what her sleep schedule was like and all of that. Honestly, a lot of that first meeting is already a blur to me. I was SO happy to finally be seeing Clarissa that I wasn't paying attention to everything going on around me! I don't remember a lot of what was said in that meeting.
OH!! I can't believe that I forgot to tell this story!! I'm off on a tangent, here we go! A few months ago when I first started talking to Jin-Ha online I mentioned to her that I wanted to learn Korean so that I could thank the foster mother when I met her. After all she's done for us, the least I could do was thank her in her own language.
So Jin-Ha told me to write down what I wanted to say and then she translated it for me and helped me learn to say it. It was five sentences and I practiced it a TON. Basically what it said in English is this: "I was very nice to meet you. Thank you for taking such good care of Clarissa, you are very special to our family. We will raise Clarissa to be proud of her Korean heritage and I hope that we can come back to Korea to visit soon." That's easy enough to say in English but much trickier in Korean when you don't speak the language!
I practiced my little speech in Korean a million times. I practiced it at home, I practiced it in the airport, I practiced on the airplane, I practiced in the hotel and I practiced in Jin-Ha's car on the way to the agency. It was so important to me to say thank you to the foster mother in Korean, but I was so worried that I would get nervous and mess it all up!!
Fortunately when the time came, I didn't mess it up. At the end of the first meeting I told the social worker that there was something I wanted to say to the foster mother in Korean and then I gave my little speech. I was SO nervous but I pulled it off! Jin-Ha says that my Korean pronunciation is good, so I'm pretty sure the foster mother understood me. I hope what I said made sense! She seemed to really appreciate it and I'm SO glad that I did it. It's also really fun to say my Korean speech and pretend that I speak Korean, lol. I sound pretty convincing for those five sentences!
All too soon the first meeting was over and it was time to say goodbye to Clarissa for the time being. The social worker thought that Clarissa seemed nervous enough around us that she thought we needed to schedule a second meeting for later in the week. That was fine with us, of course, but the problem was that the only time they could do the second meeting was the day we were supposed to be going to Clarissa's hometown to do a tour of the hospital she was born in, so we needed to do some rescheduling.
There is a branch office of the adoption agency in Clarissa's hometown and a social worker was planning to meet us at the train station and take us to the hospital and it turned out that the only other time she could do it was that day. So the social worker told us to get down to the train station quickly and get ourselves down there. We were off on another adventure!!
So we said goodbye to Clarissa, jumped in Jin-Ha's car and we were off to Seoul Station, which is the big train station in Seoul. It was about 11:45 by that point and we were trying to make the noon train. Unfortunately we missed it by about two minutes.
So we bought tickets for the 1:00 train and Jin-Ha took us out to lunch while we waited. Seoul Station is attatched to a department store and to Lotte Mart, which is Korea's version of Target or Walmart. There was a food court there where we ate. Again it was one of those places that we never would have gone without Jin-Ha because we would have had no clue how to order or even WHAT we were ordering!
It was a food court similar to what you would see at a mall in the US, but there was one central cashier where everyone places their order that services all the little food places and then you sit down and wait for your order number to come up on a big board on the wall and when you see your number you go to the food booth and get your food. We would NEVER have figured that out on our own!! It was hard to decide what to eat when everything looked completely foreign and I had no idea what anything was, but we chose something that looked sort of like bulgogi (my favorite Korean food!) and it was delicious!
At a quarter to one we said goodbye to Jin-Ha and we boarded the train for our long ride across Korea. Clarissa was born in a coastal city called Busan, which is on the complete other side of the country from Seoul. Busan is the second largest city in Korea next to Seoul. By car it's about a six hour drive but by train it's just under 3 hours. So it was already 1:00 in the afternoon and we had a three hour train ride ahead of us to Busan and then three hours back in the evening so we knew we were in for an extremely busy day.
The train ride to Busan was actually pretty cool. Getting to travel all the way across Korea was an amazing experience. It was neat to look out the window and get a view of what Korea looks like outside of Seoul. There were lots of fields and trees and farmland along the way. I enjoyed the ride.
When we got to Busan we were met by a social worker who was super nice, but it was 4pm on a Friday and I could tell that she was kind of ready for her workday to be over. Because the trip was so rushed and last minute that day, we really didn't know exactly what to expect or what we'd be doing in Busan, so I really didn't know what our plans were with the social worker. I kind of hoped that maybe we'd get to sit down with her at the agency or somewhere and ask all of our questions. We did ask some questions about her birth mother and the circumstances of Clarissa's birth while we were on the way to the hospital, but I just really wasn't sure what was OK to ask and I didn't feel like I was prepared or if the car was the best place to ask my questions. I thought there'd be more time to talk later.
We got to the hospital and a nice women at the front desk took us all up to the 5th floor, where the maternity ward was. Being in the hospital where Clarissa was born was really emotional for me. I just kept imagining her birth mother and I kept thinking about what she must have gone through while she was there and it was really overwhelming to me. The woman who gave us the tour was SO nice. She took us back to labor and delivery, showed us the room that Clarissa was born in and the nursey where she spend her first few days. It was really interesting to see a Korean hospital. It was really quite similar to what you'd see here, just a little more basic. There is good healthcare in Korea and it didn't look like a bad place to give birth.
But again, I just kept feeling Clarissa's birth mother so strongly when we were there. I felt like I was walking in her footsteps, retracing everything she'd gone through and it was so emotional for me. I know from talking to the social worker that she didn't made the decision to place Clarissa for adoption lightly. I know it must have been so hard for her and my heart hurt for her while we were there. Thinking about her leaving that hospital without her baby broke my heart. I have nothing but love and respect for Clarissa's birth mother.
But getting to see where Clarissa was born was also really neat and exciting. It was a long and exhausting trip to Busan, but I will always be SO glad that we went. I'll never have to wonder what Clarissa's first few days were like. Someday when Clarissa asks I'll be able to tell her all about it and pull out photos, and I'm grateful for that.
And speaking of photos...
We didn't learn a lot of specific information about Clarissa or her birth mother at the hospital, but just getting to be there and see where she was born was a really special experience for me. I felt like I was just trying to memorize every detail and every second of our experience there so that I can tell Clarissa all about it someday.
As we were leaving the tourguide dug through a drawer and came up with some brochures and a DVD about the hospital for us to put in Clarissa's memory box. It was a little gesture that meant a lot to me.
We walked out to the parking lot of the hospital and I think I was expecting the social worker to take us somewhere else or to the agency or SOMETHING, but our time with her was abruptly over. She flagged down a cab for us, and said her goodbyes. I didn't really feel like I got the chance to ask everything I wanted to ask her, but then again I'm not really sure what I would have asked. I just kind of felt rushed, like there wasn't enough time to think about it. In the end I didn't learn a whole lot of information about the adoption while we were there, but the trip to the hospital was 100% worth it to me. That experience will always be really special to me and I'm so glad that we did it.
Before the social worker left she asked us what our plans were for the short time we had left in Busan and we told her that we wanted to go to the beach so she told the cab driver to take us to the beach. We were off on another adventure!
When we first got to Busan we became aware that there was some sort of Asian film festival going on there that night. That really meant nothing to us at the time, but we later found out that it was kind of like Asia's version of Sundance or something and Busan was full of famous Asian movie stars that night, although we were completely oblivious.
When we got to the beach they were having part of the celebration there and there were movie screens set up on the beach with movies playing on them, which was really cool! So the beach was really crowded that night, but we had a great time.
It was around 6:00 or so when we got there and the sun was just starting to set. Never ever in my life did I think that I would be standing on the beach on the coast of Korea watching the sun set. The whole experience was really surreal to me and completely amazing. The coast of Korea is beautiful. One thing I wanted to do while I was there was collect a few seashells that I could bring back to put in Clarissa's memory box, and that ended up being a pretty easy task because there were seashells everywhere! I had a good time walking along the water picking up seashells.
Oh! Let me mention what we were wearing that day!!! We were told before we went to Korea that we were expected to dress up for any meetings we had at the agency or with the foster mother. That was fine, we brought along khakis and button ups and I wore a cardigan sweater. Frankly, I hate wearing anything besides jeans, but I'll dress up if I have to! But then we left the meeting at the agency so fast to get to the train station that there was no time to change, so we went to Busan more dressed up that I wanted to be.
That means that when we finally got to the beach we were not exactly dressed for a walk on the beach! The photos that we took there make me laugh because we look too dressed up for the beach. I took off my shoes and rolled up my pant legs to walk in the water. I was going to enjoy sand between my toes dressed up or not. :)
After we sat on the beach and watched the sunset we walked across the street and ate dinner at Burger King! As much fun as we had eating Korean food on our trip, we were so happy to see something familiar. :)
After our quick dinner we hailed a cab and got back on the road to the train station. OK, remember me telling you about the crazy drivers we encountered in Korea?? We were about to have one of those crazy driving experiences. For one thing, I think the driver took advantage of the fact that we didn't speak Korean and had no idea where we were and I'm pretty sure he took us on a scenic tour of Busan. He drove FOREVER, watching TV the whole time. We would have asked him where he was going if we knew Korean, but we didn't so we just settled down for the ride.
FOURTY FIVE minutes later we finally arrived at the train station. I'm pretty sure that the cab driver is still laughing about the ride he took the dumb Americans on, lol. He was watching a TV show while he drove and I think he decided not to stop until the show was over. Anyway, we did make it back to the train station in one piece and we boarded the train for the long ride home.
The ride to Busan was really interesting and fun. The ride HOME from Busan...wasn't. It was dark, it was late at night and we were SO tired. We tried to sleep and we managed to for a little bit, but it was still a long ride home. In 48 hours we had gone from Boise to San Francisco, San Francisco to Seoul, all the way across Korea on a train and back again, all on maybe 6 hours of sleep. We got back to our hotel around midnight and crashed into bed.
And there you have it, day two of our adventure in Korea. At this rate it's going to take a really long time to finish my Korea stories!! It's important to me to write it all down though. As much as I think I'm never going to forget all the amazing things we did in Korea, someday it will be a fuzzy memory and I'll be glad I can go back and read this and remind myself what an great adventure we had.
Stay tuned for more stories of our adventure coming soon! :)
Monday, November 2, 2009
Oink.
Well, it's official, swine flu has invaded the White house. Josh got really sick on Friday afternoon with a high fever, cough, headache and all the rest of it, so we took him to the doctor and he declared it swine flu. So far the rest of us don't have it, but I'll be surprised if it doesn't make the rounds of the family.
So our planned Halloween festivities were a little modified. Josh didn't feel well enough to go Trick or Treating so he stayed home and handed out candy with me and Clarissa and Shawn took Matthew out with an extra candy bucket so that Josh wouldn't miss out on the candy. I'm glad that we put the kids costumes on and took them out to Shawns work on Friday morning before Josh got sick because that ended up being the only time I got to see all three of them in their costumes together this Halloween. Josh is hoping that his Darth Vader costume will still fit next year so that he can give it another try next Halloween. Poor kid, being sick on Halloween is no fun!
So our weekend ended up being really low key and uneventful. Yesterday we stayed home from church and watched movies in our jammies all day. Frankly it was a MUCH needed day of rest. After all the craziness of the past month I think we all really enjoyed a quiet weekend.
Josh is home from school today but he's feeling much better and his fever is almost gone, so I'm hoping that he'll be back on his feet tomorrow. He's been sick a lot this fall, so I'm glad to see him feeling better. Today we're hanging out together watching a lot of Phineas and Furb and eating Halloween candy. :)
Aside from the swine flu things are going pretty good around here. Life with Clarissa is getting easier and more fun every single day. She has really settled into our family nicely and I'm getting used to having a baby in the house again. Now that Clarissa is more comfortable with us her personality has really come out and we're enjoying her SO much! She's extremely easy going and laid back, which is nice. I really expected her to have a more difficult transition, but she's come a LONG way in two weeks. She's gone from being scared and clingy to being really relaxed and happy. She's smiley and giggly and so much fun.
Last night was a big milestone because it was the first night she slept in her room all by herself!! She's been sleeping on the floor in our bedroom in her Korean bed, and that was working OK, but she's kind of a light sleeper and every time we made noise it was waking her up. So yesterday I moved the Korean bed into her bedroom and let her take her naps in there and she did so well that we decided to give it a try last night and it worked great! I think she's happier to be in her own room where it's quiet. She sleeps from about 8:30pm to 7:00am or so. She sometimes wakes up briefly during the night but if we pat her back for a minute she'll go right back to sleep. Considering that two weeks ago she wouldn't sleep unless I was holding her and even then she would only sleep for a couple of hours at a time, I think we've made amazing progress!!
I'm so excited to finally have her sleeping in her bedroom. When we moved into this house five years ago I immediately declared her bedroom the perfect bedroom for a little girl because of the cute bay windows and I've been going into that room for five years thinking about what it would be like to have a daughter in that room. We got it painted and decorated for her last January and I've loved to go in there and put clothes in the closet and sit on her bed and think about what it would be like to have her home, so putting her to bed in that room last night was pretty great. I'm so glad that she's finally here with us.
I'm still planning on making more blog posts about our Korea trip, but my laptop cord broke this weekend so I'm without my normal computer until the new cord gets here, and the edited versions of all my photos are on my laptop, so I'm going to wait until I get that fixed before I got back to telling my Korea stories. Hopefully I'll be back up and running in a day or two.
Also, I noticed this morning that for some reason a few photos have been deleted off the dropshots website! I have no idea how that happened, but the Halloween photos are gone! I'm going to reupload them when I get my laptop back, but in the meantime they're gone and I have no idea where they went. Weird.
Anyway, that's all the news from our house. I'm off to gorge myself on Halloween candy and spend some quality time with Josh and Clarissa! :)
So our planned Halloween festivities were a little modified. Josh didn't feel well enough to go Trick or Treating so he stayed home and handed out candy with me and Clarissa and Shawn took Matthew out with an extra candy bucket so that Josh wouldn't miss out on the candy. I'm glad that we put the kids costumes on and took them out to Shawns work on Friday morning before Josh got sick because that ended up being the only time I got to see all three of them in their costumes together this Halloween. Josh is hoping that his Darth Vader costume will still fit next year so that he can give it another try next Halloween. Poor kid, being sick on Halloween is no fun!
So our weekend ended up being really low key and uneventful. Yesterday we stayed home from church and watched movies in our jammies all day. Frankly it was a MUCH needed day of rest. After all the craziness of the past month I think we all really enjoyed a quiet weekend.
Josh is home from school today but he's feeling much better and his fever is almost gone, so I'm hoping that he'll be back on his feet tomorrow. He's been sick a lot this fall, so I'm glad to see him feeling better. Today we're hanging out together watching a lot of Phineas and Furb and eating Halloween candy. :)
Aside from the swine flu things are going pretty good around here. Life with Clarissa is getting easier and more fun every single day. She has really settled into our family nicely and I'm getting used to having a baby in the house again. Now that Clarissa is more comfortable with us her personality has really come out and we're enjoying her SO much! She's extremely easy going and laid back, which is nice. I really expected her to have a more difficult transition, but she's come a LONG way in two weeks. She's gone from being scared and clingy to being really relaxed and happy. She's smiley and giggly and so much fun.
Last night was a big milestone because it was the first night she slept in her room all by herself!! She's been sleeping on the floor in our bedroom in her Korean bed, and that was working OK, but she's kind of a light sleeper and every time we made noise it was waking her up. So yesterday I moved the Korean bed into her bedroom and let her take her naps in there and she did so well that we decided to give it a try last night and it worked great! I think she's happier to be in her own room where it's quiet. She sleeps from about 8:30pm to 7:00am or so. She sometimes wakes up briefly during the night but if we pat her back for a minute she'll go right back to sleep. Considering that two weeks ago she wouldn't sleep unless I was holding her and even then she would only sleep for a couple of hours at a time, I think we've made amazing progress!!
I'm so excited to finally have her sleeping in her bedroom. When we moved into this house five years ago I immediately declared her bedroom the perfect bedroom for a little girl because of the cute bay windows and I've been going into that room for five years thinking about what it would be like to have a daughter in that room. We got it painted and decorated for her last January and I've loved to go in there and put clothes in the closet and sit on her bed and think about what it would be like to have her home, so putting her to bed in that room last night was pretty great. I'm so glad that she's finally here with us.
I'm still planning on making more blog posts about our Korea trip, but my laptop cord broke this weekend so I'm without my normal computer until the new cord gets here, and the edited versions of all my photos are on my laptop, so I'm going to wait until I get that fixed before I got back to telling my Korea stories. Hopefully I'll be back up and running in a day or two.
Also, I noticed this morning that for some reason a few photos have been deleted off the dropshots website! I have no idea how that happened, but the Halloween photos are gone! I'm going to reupload them when I get my laptop back, but in the meantime they're gone and I have no idea where they went. Weird.
Anyway, that's all the news from our house. I'm off to gorge myself on Halloween candy and spend some quality time with Josh and Clarissa! :)
Friday, October 30, 2009
Happy (almost) Halloween!
The kids don't have school today so this morning I got them dressed in their Halloween costumes and we went over to Shawns pharmacy to do a little early Trick or Treating. Every year that I can remember we've taken the kids over there in their costumes and it's always really fun and this year it's the first time his coworkers got to meet Clarissa, so it was extra fun!
I've had Clarissa's Halloween costume sitting in her closet for the past year. I bought it the day after Halloween last year from a costume website that was having a big clearance sale.
Since we got our referral that costume has kind especially been on my mind because we didn't know if we were going to get Clarissa home in time to wear it. Whether or not Clarissa was going to make it home for Halloween has been a frequent topic of discussion around here for the past few months!
So putting the costume on her today was really really exciting. She made it home in time to wear it! :) I've looked at that costume a million times over the past year and imagined what she'd look like in it. Getting to finally see it on her was awesome!
I'm going to be taking a lot more pictures of the kids in their costumes tomorrow when they get ready to go Trick or Treating, but I got a few today of Clarissa. Enjoy the sneak peek. :)
www.dropshots.com/wenders11
I've had Clarissa's Halloween costume sitting in her closet for the past year. I bought it the day after Halloween last year from a costume website that was having a big clearance sale.
Since we got our referral that costume has kind especially been on my mind because we didn't know if we were going to get Clarissa home in time to wear it. Whether or not Clarissa was going to make it home for Halloween has been a frequent topic of discussion around here for the past few months!
So putting the costume on her today was really really exciting. She made it home in time to wear it! :) I've looked at that costume a million times over the past year and imagined what she'd look like in it. Getting to finally see it on her was awesome!
I'm going to be taking a lot more pictures of the kids in their costumes tomorrow when they get ready to go Trick or Treating, but I got a few today of Clarissa. Enjoy the sneak peek. :)
www.dropshots.com/wenders11
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Korea Revisited
Because of my limited internet access while we were in Korea and the lack of time I've had since we've been home, I feel like I never got to talk about our trip to Korea as much as I wanted to. I've been meaning to wait and do it when after I had a chance to go through all the photos I took so that I could post photos and talk about each one, but at this rate it's going to be months before I get them all done and I'll forget my stories by then.
So today, and maybe occasionally over the next week or so, I'm just going talk about what happened on our trip and share the photos I have had a chance to go through so that I get them all down in my blog before I forget them. My blog has been kind of a journal for Clarissa to read when she's older and I want to make sure that she has all these stories. So some of it might be long and boring, but it's important to me to write it all down. I won't feel bad if you skip it, it's almost more for mine and Clarissa's benefit more than anything.
So today, and maybe occasionally over the next week or so, I'm just going talk about what happened on our trip and share the photos I have had a chance to go through so that I get them all down in my blog before I forget them. My blog has been kind of a journal for Clarissa to read when she's older and I want to make sure that she has all these stories. So some of it might be long and boring, but it's important to me to write it all down. I won't feel bad if you skip it, it's almost more for mine and Clarissa's benefit more than anything.
So just humor me, I have a lot to talk about!
Let's start with the plane ride over there. You all know how much I hate to fly, right?! I've literally been terrified for months about getting on that plane. The morning we left for Korea was so hard for me. I was emotional anyway because we were about to go get Clarissa, plus I've never left the boys for that long and I was having a hard time thinking about being away for that long. Add that to the fact that I was dreading getting on the airplane and I was kind of a mess!
I always worry way too much about flying and it always ends up not being as bad as I thought. Will someone please remind me of that the next time I freak out about flying?? The flight from Boise to San Francisco was a piece of cake. It was close to two hours but I swear it felt like 10 minutes!
The flight from San Francisco to Seoul unfortunately did NOT seem like 10 minutes! We flew Singapore Air and really it was as comfortable as economy class on an 12 hour flight could be, but still, it was long and not all that much fun. When we got on the plane the pilot announced that it was going to be a bumpy flight because we would be flying around a typhoon. Seriously, the last thing a plane phobic person wants to hear is that they'll be flying around a TYPHOON! I was pretty sure that we'd all be dying a horrible firey death.
But we didn't and I survived. It was a pretty bumpy ride at times, but thankfully turbulence on a great big plane doesn't really feel as scary as turbulence on a little plane for some reason. Frankly, we were so tired that I'm not sure anything would have phased us much at that point!So for 12 long hours we ate really bad airplane food, we watched a bunch of movies and we tried to sleep for a while and finally we made it over the ocean, around the typhoon and I looked out the airplane window and saw Japan!! I watched as we flew over Tokyo and it was really amazing. For a girl who had never left the country before and hates to fly, seeing Japan out the airplane window was when it really hit me that I was embarking on a pretty amazing adventure!
Finally we passed Japan and crossed into Korea. I'll never forget seeing Korea for the first time outside the airplane window. For two years I have waited and hoped for Clarissa and thought about her life in Korea every single day, and suddenly I was seeing it for myself. I sat with tears in my eyes and watched the sun set over Korea out the airplane window. It was an experience I'll never forget.
We landed at the Incheon airport, which is on an island just outside of Seoul, and we made our way through the airport. I was so happy to have my feet on the ground again and all the way through the airport I kept saying "can you believe we're in KOREA?!" It still didn't seem real! The Incheon airport has been ranked one of the best airports in the world and it's REALLY nice! It's huge, but really easy to maneuver and it's really clean.
Oh! Here's something cool about the Incheon airport! First of all, they have a big kids play area in the airport to keep your kids happy while you wait which is amazing, and second, they have really cool family bathrooms. There's a little room off the main womens bathroom (maybe the mens bathroom has one too, I don't know) and you slide open the door and there is a regular sized toilet, the CUTEST little toddler sized toilet and a baby changing area. How cool is that?! I changed Clarissa in that room on the way home from Korea and I couldn't get over how nice it was.
Anyway, back to the story. At this point we had been up for something like 19 or 20 hours and we were completely exhausted!! We got our luggage and went to airport entrance where a driver from the agency was supposed to meet us, but we were a little early and he wasn't there yet. That was OK with me because I was so excited to actually be in Korea that I just wanted to look at EVERYTHING! I went in a few of the airport stores and I bravely used Korean money to buy lipgloss at a cute little makeup shop. I was so proud of myself! It was also the first chance I had to use the tiny bit of Korean I know, which I was all excited about! (Seriously, the amount of Korean I know consists of things like Hello and thank you. Not so impressive.)
It was also where we started our fun little game of pointing out poorly translated English. If you ever go to another country, "spot the poorly translated English" is a fun game to play. We had a good time with that through our whole trip. :)
So I bought lipgloss, we giggled at the Kraze Burger slogan (in case you can't read it, their slogan is "It's my burger more than a burger") and we waited for our driver.
In the meantime, here's something interesting about Korea. Korea is obviously a very technologically advanced country and I read a statistic that 90% of Koreans own a cellphone. At the airport you can actually rent cellphones for $3 a day (plus per minute call charges). Super cool! So we stopped and rented a cellphone for the week so that we could call home and make calls during our trip. We used that thing a lot!
While we waited for the driver I took video:
Finally the van driver arrived and we made the trip into Seoul. The airport is actually about an hour outside of Seoul, so it took us a while to get to our hotel. It was an amazing ride though because we finally got to look around!
Here are the first two things I observed about Korea. First of all, there are some BEAUTIFUL bridges around Seoul that are all lit up at night. I saw so many pretty bridges on our trip. I really wished I could have stopped to take pictures of them.
The second thing I observed is that Koreans are crazy drivers!! I spent way too much time worrying about dying on the airplane on the way over there when what I should have been worried about is dying in a car accident while I was there! We had some interesting driving experiences while we were in Korea. For one thing, practically every single car has a GPS navigation system on the windshield-and they also broadcast live TV! So you'll be flying down the freeway at 70 miles per hour and everyone is watching TV while they drive.
But driving in Korea is an interesting thing, which leads me to the third thing I observed. Koreans are extremely nice and respectful of others. They might be driving 70 miles an hour, watching TV and weaving in and out of traffic, but they're all very calm about it. Cars will pass on the right, swerve into other lanes, merge into traffic like they have a death wish, and everyone is all very nice about it. Cars will move out of the way for each other, no one honks and screams out the window and I didn't see one middle finger! I saw no road rage in Korea!
So pardon the tangent, but seriously Koreans are the calmest, nicest people I've ever met. One day on our trip we were in a cab in Seoul and our cab driver came about two inches from running over some guy crossing the street (because that's what happens when you watch TV while you drive!!). I totally thought he was going to hit him and we were going to see him flying over the windshield. But he stopped just in time and the guy walked around to the side of the cab and I was fully expecting him to start screaming obscenities at the cab driver for almost plowing over him and the guy leaned into the cab drivers window and smiled and waved. The cab driver waved back and the guy continued crossing the street. I LOVE Koreans. :) I have a ton of stories of the nice people we encountered in Korea, which I will eventually get to.
Anyway, back to the story, the van driver finally got us to our hotel. It was a REALLY nice hotel, called Lotte City. From what I could tell, the Lotte company (pronounced Low-tay) pretty much owns Seoul. There are Lotte hotels, a Lotte amusement park, a Lotte mall, Lotte Mart, which is like Koreas version of Target only bigger, and all sorts of other Lotte things. Actually, we later realized that the Korean grill we own is a Lotte brand. The Lotte name was everywhere in Korea.
The Lotte City hotel is in a business section of town and it's really kind of a business hotel. It's a new hotel, very modern with lots of glass and marble. It has a really pretty fountain out front and a Dunkin' Donuts across the street. :) There are a LOT of Dunkin' Donuts in Seoul!!
We got checked into our hotel and a few minutes later we finally got to meet my friend Jin-Ha!Remember when I talked about how NICE Koreans are? I think Jin-Ha is the ambassador of nice Koreans. We couldn't have had a warmer welcome and she showed up with a bag full of food so that we'd have breakfast in the morning. That came to be a theme with Jin-Ha. Everytime we turned around she was providing us with more food. She constantly worried about us being hungry!
I actually took photos of the food she brought because some of it was so...foreign! Jin-Ha's husband owns a milk company, so she brought us a bottle of milk from his company, which we thought was kind of neat (we actually washed out the bottle and brought it home! I think I'm going to keep change in that bottle...), and she brought us some fruit and some snacks that I still have no idea what they were, but they were good!
Here's my next tangent-Korean fruit is HUGE! From what I could tell, Koreans don't really eat a lot of sweets (aside from Dunkin' Donuts, I guess!), they eat a lot of fruit. We ate a lot of fruit in Korea and it was all delicious and it all looked like it was on steroids! We ate grapes the size of plumbs and pears the size of melons! Koreans are very proud of their Korean pears. Someone told me with much pride that Michael Jackson liked Korean pears. They're gigantic and REALLY good. They're crunchier than any pear I've ever had, more like an apple. Yum. If you ever go to Korea, make sure you eat a pear!
And speaking of food, that brings me back to the story. After Jin-Ha met us at our hotel she took us out to dinner. At this point I think we'd been up for close to 24 hours and we were completely overwhelmed and exhausted, but really excited for our first real Korean experience. We were so blessed to be able to spend a lot of time with Jin-Ha while we were in Korea and we got to experience a lot of things that we wouldn't have if she hadn't been with us. I'm really grateful for that.
She took us to a little restaraunt near her house. One of those "real" Korean places that a tourist would never go because they'd have no idea what to do there! We sat on the floor around a little table that had a grill in the middle of it and they brought us strips of pork to grill on it. Then they brought us lots of little bowls filled with all sorts of things I've never seen before. I saw this same type of meal several times during our stay in Korea. Every meal involves lots of little bowls full of interesting things, most of which I still can't identify.
One thing I CAN indentify is kimchee. Kimchee is served with pretty much every meal in Korea. Kimchee is basically fermented cabage that has been marinated in a really spicy sauce. Koreans LOVE it. Me? Not so much, lol. Let me just say that I am NOT an adventurous eater. I knew that food was going to be the hardest thing for me in Korea because it's hard for me to try new food. I'm ridiculously picky. I did try everything though! I even ate seaweed! Multiple times! I never thought I'd eat seaweed...
You can tell that Koreans are proud of their food. It's always served beautifully and I could tell that they put a lot of work into it. Korean food tends to be spicy though, since a lot of it is made with red pepper paste, which my tounge can only handle in small amounts!
Anyway, that first meal with Jin-Ha was really fun. It was really neat to see real Korean food and try lots of new things. I think Jin-Ha was amused watching us try all of the food that she sees every day but we'd never heard of before.
So here's my last tangent and then I'm done with stories for the night. Koreans use chopsticks with every meal. The table is set with chopsticks and a spoon, never a fork. That was fine, we were super excited to work on our chopstick skills, but every single time a Korean person saw us holding chopsticks on the entire trip they would inevitably wrinkle their brow and offer to find us a fork. And on the entire trip no one was ever able to sucessfully track down a single fork for us! We didn't really want a fork, we wanted to use chopsticks, but apparently we were doing it all wrong. Jin-Ha's son tried to show us the right way to hold them, but he eventually gave up on us. :) We ate just fine and we manged to get food to our mouths, but Koreans seemed to be really amused by our chopstick skills. We tried, we really did! :)
Ok, I'm going to bed now. That was a super long post about a lot of random things, wasn't it?! At this rate it's going to take me a long time to get through all the stories of our trip. I've got lots more to talk about, so stay tuned! :)
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Mediocre Media Wednesday
Wouldn't that title have sounded SO much better if it had been Monday?! :)
So I was thinking today that I wished I had more photos and video to share, but I'm so ridiculously picky about that sort of thing that I never want to post anything until I've taken a bunch of really good shots and have had time to go through them all, pick out the best ones and do a little touchup editing on them and these days I just never have the time for that!
So today I decided that my goal is to post things even if I cringe a little that they're not perfect. The photographer in me wants everything to look perfect, but sometimes I just want to be a mom taking snapshots!
So anyway, there are two new photos on the dropshots website that I took today. I wanted to take a few of Clarissa and the boys but by the time I got them all sitting together I realized that I only had one shot left on my memory card (because all the Korea photos that I STILL haven't gone through are one there!), so I took one really mediocre shot and called it a day, lol. I also took a photo of Clarissa earlier today when she was playing. She's been in a really good mood today!
Then as I was getting ready to post them, Josh was sitting on the floor playing with Clarissa and he had her laughing SO much! It's the most I've heard her laugh since she got here! So I grabbed my little Flip video camera to capture it, but the video turned out really washed out and grainy. I can't win today, lol. But it's cute hearing her laugh, so I'm sharing it anyway! Pardon the mess of the toys all over the floor. This is what it looks like in my house right now after a day of playing on the floor with Clarissa. :)
Anyway, enjoy!
www.dropshots.com/Wenders11
So I was thinking today that I wished I had more photos and video to share, but I'm so ridiculously picky about that sort of thing that I never want to post anything until I've taken a bunch of really good shots and have had time to go through them all, pick out the best ones and do a little touchup editing on them and these days I just never have the time for that!
So today I decided that my goal is to post things even if I cringe a little that they're not perfect. The photographer in me wants everything to look perfect, but sometimes I just want to be a mom taking snapshots!
So anyway, there are two new photos on the dropshots website that I took today. I wanted to take a few of Clarissa and the boys but by the time I got them all sitting together I realized that I only had one shot left on my memory card (because all the Korea photos that I STILL haven't gone through are one there!), so I took one really mediocre shot and called it a day, lol. I also took a photo of Clarissa earlier today when she was playing. She's been in a really good mood today!
Then as I was getting ready to post them, Josh was sitting on the floor playing with Clarissa and he had her laughing SO much! It's the most I've heard her laugh since she got here! So I grabbed my little Flip video camera to capture it, but the video turned out really washed out and grainy. I can't win today, lol. But it's cute hearing her laugh, so I'm sharing it anyway! Pardon the mess of the toys all over the floor. This is what it looks like in my house right now after a day of playing on the floor with Clarissa. :)
Anyway, enjoy!
www.dropshots.com/Wenders11
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