Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Hospitals and home decor

So much to talk about today!

A few nights ago Matthew's voice started to sound kind of hoarse and raspy. He said he felt fine and he didn't have any other symptoms of being sick. That night we let the boys sleep in the basement together.

At about 4am Josh came into our room and woke us up, saying that Matthew sounded funny. Matthew came in to our room behind him, sounding like he could barely breathe, pretty much unable to talk with a barky cough. He sounded terrible! Shawn took one look at him and decided to talke him to the ER.

I tend to freak out when these things happen. Not in front of the kids of course, but I have a mental freakout. My anxiety kicks in. I'm always convinced that everyone has some horrible disease. I haven't always been this way, but I think I can pin it down to two reasons. First of all, my dad went in for normal gallbladder removal day surgery and when they removed it it was covered in cancer and he died the next year. They said if he hadn't had his gallbladder removed they wouldn't have known he had cancer until the very end. Now I'm conviced that I have some terrible disease lurking in my body that no one knows about, lol. I had to gave my gallbladder removed a couple of years ago. It wasn't pretty.

Second, I used to do volunteer work for the Leukemia and Lymphoma society after an internet friend of mine lost her baby to Leukemia. I'm proud of the work I did, but after a year or two of hearing story after story of children with cancer, you start to feel like everyone has cancer. I know more about childhood diseases that anyone really needs to know. I love to research things but that was one of those cases where ignorance is bliss. I wish I could unlearn some of the things I know.

So now when my kids have a headache I'm sure it's a tumor, when they get a bruise it's Leukemia, and when they come into my room at 4 in the morning unable to breathe, I don't know what it is, but it's got to be something bad. Shawn, fortunately, isn't nearly as neurotic as I am. He knows what's going on in my head when these things happen and he's always the voice of reason. That poor guy has to live with me every day. Can you imagine?!

So he packed Matthew up and took him to the hospital. The doctor took one look at him declared it croup. He said it was the third case he'd had that night. They gave Mattew a breathing treatment, some steroids, a popcicle and some stickers and sent him home. Matthew thought that eating popcicles at 4 in the morning was way cool, and any time someone gives him stickers he's made a friend for life, so it was all one big adventure for him!

So we've stayed home for the past few days and it's been pretty low key and boring around here. Thank goodness the kids have Christmas toys to keep them busy. Matthew seems to be feeling fine. His voice is still a little raspy, but otherwise he's doing much better. Life will continue. :)

So that brings me to topic #2! Since we've been home doing absolutely nothing for the past few days, I've had some time to start planning Clarisssa's bedroom. Yay!

The first thing I decided was that I'm not going to do a baby's room. We're not going to put a crib in there. One thing I learned recently is that babies in Korea don't sleep in cribs, they sleep on the floor. Long ago, before good home heating systems, Korean homes were heated with hot stones underneath the floors. Since that's where the heat was, they slept on mats on the floor because that was the best way to stay warm. Even now that there are modern heating options available, most Korean homes are still heated with heated floors, although they're not longer stones, now they're modern heated pipes or something, and it's still common to sleep on the floor. According to people I've talked to who have slept that way, it's much more comfortable than it sounds.

So while babies are with their foster parents, they usually sleep on the floor next to the foster mother. I love that, actually. It makes me happy to know that Clarissa is probably sleeping snuggled up next to her foster mother. But from what I've heard, a lot of Korean babies refuse to sleep in a crib when they come to their American homes. For bonding purposes it's better to sleep next to them for at least the first few months, and it almost seems mean to make them sleep in a little box by themselves after being used to sleeping in a more open space with their moms. So no crib. By the time Clarissa gets here she's going to be close to a year old anyway, and if she sleeps with us for a while the crib would be pointless. I don't want to put a baby's room together and then have to switch it to a bed later if the crib isn't even going to be used much.

So my solution is a trundle bed. I always wanted a trundle bed growing up! I figure that by the time we're ready to put Clarissa in her own room to sleep, she'll be old enough to sleep in the trundle part of the bed just fine. She'll be used to sleeping near the floor anyway. Then when we decide that we're comfortable with her sleeping on a regular bed, we'll just move her up to the top part of the bed.

Let me just say that I'm not a girly person at all! I've always been kind of a tomboy. When I was little I didn't play with dolls, I caught frogs and snakes in the canals by our house and made forts in the fields. I don't know anything about cute little girl things. I don't like pink ruffly things and I like really simple, clean decor. So it's been kind of hard for me to come up with a little girls room that is cute and girly, but still my style. I'm much better with boys rooms!

I knew that I was going to be decorating around this art print:



I can't even begin to tell you how crazy in love I am with that artists work. It's totally my style, the little girls look Asian and I knew that I just had to decorate around her art. She's the same woman that I had draw Clarissa's dress. She's incredible.


Anyway, to make a long story shorter (you know I don't tell short stories!), after consulting with my brilliant internet friends yesterday, we came up with this:

The background is the three colors I'm going to paint the room, I'm going to buy a white trundle bed with a matching dresser, I'm going to hang up the artwork I love and I'm going to buy that bedding. It's totally my style, it's totally cute and I can't wait to get started on it!

It's finally starting to feel real. I'm decorating an actual bedroom for an actual child. The closer we get to the finish line the more real it is to me and the more excited I get. Waiting through a nine month pregnancy to finally get to meet my babies was hard, but waiting twice that is torture! We're almost there!!!

Saturday, December 27, 2008

The aftermath

Another Christmas has come and gone. I love getting ready for Christmas, I love all the excitement in the air and I love all the fun traditions, but I'm always a little sad when it's all over!

We did have a really great Christmas though. Santa brought lots of fun toys, Matthew won the first annual "find Grandfather Santa" game and won Matchbox cars, we ate way too much Christmas food, played some fun games and wore ourselves out.

One of the things I bought Shawn for Christmas was the entire Arrested Development series on DVD. We've never seen it before, but I often hear it compared to The Office, and I found it super cheap on Amazon one day so I thought it might be a fun gift. We started watching it on Christmas afternoon while the kids were occupied with their new toys and we immediately got HOOKED! How did we not know about this show when it was on??! We've had a good time watching it over the past few days. It only went three seasons, which is a shame because it's hysterically funny.

We had plans to go out and do a few things over these past couple of days, but the weather has been crazy here so we've mostly stayed home. Boise usually gets very little snow, and if it does snow it usualy melts pretty quick. But this has been an usual year so far, it started snowing about a week or so ago and it's just kept going! We had a ton of snow today, I think the most I've seen since we've lived here.

And because Boise isn't used to getting so much snow, driving around town is kind of a mess when we get it. Snow plows don't get the roads plowed very quickly and most drivers aren't good at snow driving, so traffic really crawls. So the past few days have been really low key and we've mostly hung out around here. The kids are happy just to hang out and play with their new toys, and we've used the extra time to get some Arrested Development episodes in so it's worked out nicely. It's actually kind of nice to have a few days with nothing much to do. I think we've all enjoyed it.

So now that Christmas is over, my mind can now focus full time on the adoption! For the past several months I've been telling myself that I was going to wait until after Christmas to start really getting excited about the idea of our referral, to start buying baby things and start thinking about decorating Clarissa's room. Now here we are! The average wait is 14-17 months and we're in our 13th month. I don't realistically expect a referral until closer to March or April, but I think we've reached the point where we can start preparing. We're getting so close!! I'm starting to think about paint colors and bedding and buying baby clothes. I've been looking at little girl clothes on the internet and it occurs to me that I have a lot to learn! I have no idea what little girls wear, I've got to start paying attention.

I have big plans for her bedroom, but this post is long enough, so I'm going to wait until next time to discuss them. It's definitely going to need it's own post. Stay tuned! :)

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

The annual Christmas Eve photo

Merry Christmas Eve! We've seen the Christmas lights, we put out the Santa key, we opened our new pj's, we left food for the reindeer, we put out the cookies for Santa and the kids are all snuggled in their beds. Another successful Christmas Eve!

So every year after the kids open their jammies before they go to bed I take a photo of them in front of the Christmas tree. I started the tradition by accident really. I took a photo of them on Christmas Eve when Matthew was a baby and then the next year I realized that just by cooincidence I took another photo of them in front of the tree that looked just like the one the year before. A tradition was born. :)

So tonight I bring you all the photos from Christmas's past, as well as tonights photo. It's fun to watch them grow up and I'm excited to think that next year the photo will change as we add Clarissa to the photo!

Merry Christmas! :)


Tuesday, December 23, 2008

It's almost Christmas!

I love Christmas. I love everything about it. When I was growing up, Christmas was a huge event at our house. The very best memories I have of my dad are at Christmas, because I don't think anyone loves Christmas as much as he did. He always made it really fun for our family. We had a lot of fun family traditions that always made it extra fun and special.

Probably the best memories I have of my childhood are of sitting around the kitchen table playing games on Christmas afternoons. My dad loved board games and it was always a big family event to have game tournaments at the holidays. My mom would make lots of yummy treats and we would sit around and eat too much food and play games all afternoon. Those are memories that make me smile.

When I became a mother it was my goal to carry those traditions on to my own children. Christmas is still a really big deal at our house. We get up at the crack of dawn to open presents and then we have a great big breakfast, spend the morning putting toys together and looking at all of our gifts, and then we spend the whole day in our pj's, watching Christmas movies, playing games and eating way too much. It's an event that we all look forward to.

Shawn always makes sure to save some vacation time so that Christmas isn't a one day event here. He's going to be home tomorrow through the rest of the week, so we have lots of time to do fun activities and really enjoy some family time. The day after Christmas we'll go see a movie, play more games and do more fun family things.

I'm like a five year old at Christmas, I love it so much. So today I'm keeping an eye on the clock, just counting down the hours until Shawn gets home and our extended Christmas celebration can get started. We have some fun Christmas Eve traditions that I'm looking forward to tomorrow. We let the kids open one present on Christmas Eve, which is always new pajamas. That's something we did at my house growing up that I always loved. It was always really fun to wear new pajamas to bed on Christmas eve. Then after the kids put their new pj's on, we make hot chocolate, get in the car with some blankets and our hot chocolate and we drive around looking at Christmas lights. That's Shawn's favorite Christmas eve tradition from his childhood, so it's something he always looks forward to.

Then we come home, put reindeer food on the sidewalk for the reindeer, we put the Santa key out for Santa (so that he can get in the house, since he can't get through our fireplace!) put cookies and milk out for Santa and then we put the kids to bed. It's something we all look forward to every Christmas eve. I love watching the kids get excited about Santa coming. It just reminds me of being a kid. I'm 33 years old and I still get excited on Christmas eve.

So today I'm killing time. I've pretty much got all the Christmas preparations ready to go and I'm ready to start the fun! We don't have a lot going on today, I need to find some sort of fun project to do with the kids or something to keep us busy.

I can already feel the excitement in the air around here and I'm loving every minute of it. Only 40 more hours to go until Christmas!

Monday, December 22, 2008

Thirteen months

Yesterday was the 21st and I didn't even realize it. As of yesterday we have officially waited 13 months for Clarissa. Normally I have my own personal celebration that I've made it through another month, but I went through the whole day yesterday not thinking about what day it was, so I missed my celebration. That's OK, I'll celebrate today. I'll have a 13 months and one day celebration. :)

Right now the expected wait time is 14-17 months. I expect to be closer to the 17 than the 14, but we really are getting very close. At this point it almost seems strange to think that we're finally going to know who she is soon. Clarissa has exsisted only in my head for so long that sometimes I think that's all she's ever going to be. I've been waiting for so long that I can't remember not waiting anymore. To actually see her and realize that she's finally an actual person, and not just someone I've made up in my mind is almost going to seem weird at first! :)

That makes no sense, I'm sure. Waiting for someone to come into my life for so long has been an interesting experience. I feel so connected to her, I pray for her, I dream about her and I think about her, but I don't even know who she is. Adoption is a sad event and an extremely happy event at the same time. I feel bad for her. I feel bad that her birth mother wasn't able to care for her, I feel bad that she's getting attached to foster parents who she will have to say goodbye to and sometimes I feel guilty knowing that we're taking her away from her birth country.

But one the other hand, I know that this is God's plan for her. I don't know why, but I feel strongly that she was meant to join our family. She's a part of us. I want her to be with us and to feel loved and feel part of a family. I want to be able to give her the things that she couldn't have had if she had been raised in Korea. There's no changing her circumstances. Children born to single mothers or children adopted in Korea are always kind of looked at as second class citizens in Korea. It's not a good life for them. Here she can grow up happy and accepted, without the constant stigma of being an adopted child. I want that for her.

But it's an odd feeling, loving someone you don't even know. It's an odd feeling missing someone that you've never met. I think that by the time she gets here I'm never going to want to put her down. I'm just going to want to stare at her face and be amazed that she's finally real.

Thirteen months have gone by. I know she's out there somewhere. I hope she's safe and happy and feeling loved. And I hope that I'm holding her in my arms soon.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Snow day!

It is absolutely BEAUTIFUL outside right now! It's been snowing big fluffy snowflakes most of the day. Boise doesn't really get that much snow, and some winters we don't get any, but this year is shaping up to be an unusually snowy winter.

Because snow in Boise is so hit and miss, we take every opportunity we can to go play in it when it's around. I grew up in a different part of Idaho where the winters were a lot more severe. We had heavy snowfall there every winter and I can remember how much fun it was to go out and make snow forts and snowmen. It was always a really fun part of the year.

Our kids don't get that many opportunities to play in the snow, so we bundled them up and went out there a little while ago to build a snowman. Our snowman kind of failed, but we did have a good snowball fight!

We played until we got too cold (which didn't take very long!) and then we came in the house and had hot chocolate. It's supposed to snow all week here, so I'm looking forward to having a snowy Christmas. That's pretty rare around here! I love snow in December, but ask me again in January. Once Christmas is over I hate it and I start looking forward to spring!

Here are a few photos of our fun in the snow today:














Friday, December 19, 2008

A little nuts

So a little while ago I was looking out my kitchen window and I could see a squirrel in the yard trying to uncover the walnuts he buried. We have a big walnut tree in our backyard and we pretty much leave all the walnuts to the squirrels. I love to spend the fall watching them gather all the nuts off the tree and hide them in the yard. They bury them in the grass and the landscaping, which I find both really cute and really irritating in the spring when I have to go around and pull up little walnut tree starts from all over my yard.

Anyway, right now there is snow on the ground and the poor squirrel was digging through the snow to get to his walnuts. Amazingly he he found some, but I felt bad for him because it's so cold, lol. I'm crazy, I KNOW, but I'm so soft hearted when it comes to animals!

So anyway, I decided that my squirrels needed a Christmas present, so I went to the bird store (my favorite store in town!) and I bought a squirrel feeder and some peanuts. So now my squirrels won't have to work so hard. They can stay fat and happy all winter long with a tummy full of peanuts.


Merry Christmas, squirrels! Here's a photo of the feeder, and I'll attempt to get one of the squirrels at the feeder later!

New look

Two things around here got a cosmetic update last night. This blog, and Josh!

The last few days Josh has been complaining of eye problems. His left eye kept getting blurry and he was seeing spots. I was concerned (OK, freaking out), so yesterday we got him in to the eye doctor. The eye doctor did a really thorough check of his eyes and it turns out that he's having visual migranes. Basically it's a migrane without the pain. They're not uncommon and nothing to worry about, except that they're probably a little annoying. I hope that they don't lead to regular migranes though. We're keeping and eye on it.

But what the eye doctor DID discover is that Josh needs glasses! This is not surprising news to anyone really, since every single person in my family and almost everyone in Shawn's family has poor eyesight. I got glasses in the fourth grade and I believe Shawn was in the sixth grade. We've known since we had kids that there was almost no chance that they were going to be lucky enough to have perfect eyesight!

Fortunately Josh is THRILLED with the idea of having glasses. It's been funny to see how excited he is about them. We spent a while last night at the eye doctor picking out the right pair, and he loves the ones we picked. It's going to take a week or two for them to be ready and he can't wait! It's going to be strange to see him with glasses on, but I'm sure we'll get used to it. He said that his glasses make him look smart!

Then we got home, got the kids to bed and I decided to update my blog decor. I spent a while working on the header and I love it, it makes me smile. But I can't wait until I can replace Clarissa's dress with an actual picture of Clarissa in our family collages!

So there you have it, two makeovers in the same night. Today I'm just going to be running around getting some last minute Christmas stuff done while the kids are at their last day of school before Christmas break. We were planning to go out of town this weekend for a family Christmas party in my hometown, but it's supposed to snow all weekend and we're not sure how badly we want to make the trip in crappy weather. It's a four hour drive and I just don't know if we're up to it this weekend.

So chances are we're just going too stay home, watch it snow, maybe go see a movie and hopefully build a snowman in the yard. Those are the kind of weekends I love. :)

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Korean night!!

We had so much fun last night! Larry, one of Shawn's pharmacy techs and my Korean tutor, came over last night and gave me lots of information on Korean cooking and he made us a Korean meal!

Larry is Korean, he was born there and lived there when he was young and then his family moved to the US. He actually went to cooking school and his family owned a Korean restaraunt for a while. So he was the perfect person to tell me all about Korean food! He made three dishes, marinated hard boiled eggs (I forget what they're called, but it was good!), a noodle dish, which I believe is called Chapchae, and Bulgogi, which is marinated beef. It was all SO good! It looked so good that I hurried and took a few pictures before we ate.







YUM!! Larry is the nicest guy, he's been really helping me with my Korean and we've enjoyed having him over. He brought his girlfriend last night, who was really nice, and after dinner we watched a Korean movie. It was a really fun Korean culture night at our house and we ate until we were stuffed!!

I'm loving having him as a Korean tutor. I'm learning what I can on my own, but it helps to have someone who can answer my questions and give me more information. I'm soaking up everything I can right now. Last night he gave us a chopstick lesson, which was really fun. I'm totally no good at it, but I'm working on it! He's been a really fun friend for our family.

Today I don't have a whole lot planned, except getting some Christmas things together. I've got to get some presents wrapped, make sure that I have teacher gifts for my kids to take to school tomorrow and finish up some last minute things. The kids start Christmas break on Monday, so I need to use these last two days to get things out and wrap presents while they're not around to peek!

Christmas is sneaking up on me too quickly this year! This last month has flown by. On Sunday it will officially be 13 months since we started our adoption wait. Technically right now the wait time is 14-18 months, so it would be possible that we could get our referral as early as a month from now, but I don't anticipate that happening. Our social worker told us that January is a notoriously slow month for referrals for some reason and I know that there are still several people ahead of us on the list. I'm being realistic and hoping for a referral in March, possibly even April. My birthday is April 4th and I'm really hoping that we'll have a referral by then. A referral would be a wonderful birthday present!
So now I'm off to wrap presents and start my day. I have a whole fridge full of leftover Korean food to eat for lunch. YAY!! :)

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Facebook flashback

Recently I discovered Facebook. I didn't think that I was a Myspace/Facebook kind of person, so it's never really been my thing. But then a couple of months ago someone invited me to be their Facebook friend so I decided that I would set something up over there, and then suddenly I started finding all sort of people who I haven't heard from in years! I'm incredibly nostalgic about the past and I hate losing touch with people, so Facebook has been awesome. I'm loving catching up with people and hearing what old friends are up to.

Last night on Facebook I discovered one of the kids I used to nanny for. When I was 19, I moved from Idaho to New Jersey for a year to be a live in nanny. For some reason when I was young I was obsessed with living in New York City. I'd never been anywhere NEAR New York City, but for some reason it seemed like the coolest place to live. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up (unless you count this blog, that never happened!), and for some reason I had the idea in my head that I needed to live in New York City if I was going to be a writer. I had that plan in my head from the time I was about 12.

So then when I was 19 I kind of hit a crossroads in my life. After I graduated from High School I went to a year of college and hated everything about it. Not that I necessarily hated college, I just wasn't taking any classes that interested me, I lived in a tiny apartment with five other girls, which really wasn't my thing, and the whole year I just kind of felt lost. You go through your whole first 18 years of life with everything planned out for you and then suddenly you find yourself out in the world by yourself, expected to figure it all out, and that year I hadn't really figured it out yet.

That's when I got the idea back in my head to move to New York City. I was young, free, and I knew that it was going to be my only chance to really take an adventure like that. So I found a family in New Jersey who lived less than a half hour outside of New York City who needed a nanny and I packed up and moved across the country for a year.

That was an amazing, crazy adventure of a year, that's for sure! I was the nanny to four absolutely gorgeous little girls. The lived in a beautiful town in a beautiful house and it was really kind of an interesting experience to live with someone elses family for a while. Living with a wealthy family outside of New York City is really different than growing up in a small town in Idaho. It was a culture adjustment at first, more than I thought it would be. It was good for me though and a chance to step outside of the little bubble I'd been living in. I'd barely been out of Idaho before then and suddenly I was getting to visit all sorts of great places. Suddenly I could just get on a bus and be in New York City in 20 minutes. On my days off I would go there and just wander the streets, taking it all in and just loving the fact that it was just me, on my own, doing what I'd always wanted to do. I absolutely loved New York City.

During that year I also took my own little excursions to Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and I even got to go to Florida with their family, where I took a little day trip through the Everglades. Pretty exciting for a naive kid from Idaho who'd never been anywhere before!

That was a really tough year for me too though. It was really the year that I had to do some serious thinking about where my life was going to go, and a lot of things were changing. It was the year I found out that my dad was dying of cancer, it was the year that the boy I loved was out of the country and not exactly keeping in touch and it was the year that I realized that life doesn't always work out the way that you plan. I look back on that year at one of the best and one of the most difficult of my life.

But being a nanny was fun. I loved those girls, I loved the town I lived in, I loved the opportunities to travel and I loved the feeling of freedom. I was truly on my own that year, and I liked it. I learned a lot about the world that year.

Life changed when I left New Jersey. The boy came home and broke my heart, my dad died, I couldn't make up my mind about going back to college and things were in an upheaval for a while. Thank goodness that I met Shawn during that time. I actually met Shawn less than a month after I got home. I decided to get a job for a while while I figured out what to do next, and he was one of the very first people I met on my first day of work. Without him to lean on, the next year of my life would have been a lot harder.

I don't remember why I'm even telling that story. I think Facebook is making me nostalgic! I think my point was that the sweet little girl I nannied for, who I watched go off to her first day of Kindergarten, is now turning 20 and is going to college at Duke. She's the age that I was when I was her nanny. She could be MY nanny now.

Life goes by really fast. I'm glad that I took that year when I was young and free to travel, spend some time learning about life and opening my mind a little. As hard as that time in my life was, I look back on it and smile. I have good memories of those kids, and my adventures in New York City will always be in my heart. I haven't been back there in 15 years, but one of these days I'm going to go back again. I want to show Shawn and the kids all the places I loved.

So I'm a little obsessed with Facebook right now. I've loved catching up with old high school friends and others who I haven't seen or heard from in a long time. The people who were special to me 15 years ago are still special to me now and it's been fun getting to revisit some old memories. It turns out that I really am a Facebook kind of person after all.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Tuesday ramble

I wonder what Clarissa is doing right now. I wonder if she has a pretty Christmas tree to look at, and I wonder if she's going to have a present to open on Christmas morning. Some Koreans celebrate Christmas and some don't. The ones that do pretty much do it the same way that we do it here. I hope that she gets to hear Christmas carols and see the Christmas lights. As excited as I am about Christmas this year, a little part of me is sad that Clarissa isn't here with us. I knows she's out there somewhere, spending Christmas with someone else. She should be home with us.

I've been looking for a Korean Christmas tradition that we can start with our family, but it's been tough because Korea gets most of the Christmas traditions from the US. Because Korea been largely Buddist, Christmas hasn't really been a big deal until recent years as the Christian population has started to grow. So those that do celebrate Christmas do it the American way. They put up a tree and sing carols and exchange gifts. Korean New Year, which is in January, is the REALLY big holiday of the season in Korea, so they do a lot of their big celebrations then.

But a few weeks ago I was looking online for Korean related things (which I tend to do a lot these days!) and I came across a statue of Grandfather Santa, who is the Korean Santa Clause. He looks like an old Asian man with a white beard and he wears a long green robe. I like him. So I decided to buy Grandfather Santa and make him our new Christmas tradition.

When I got him in the mail I called the kids into the room and showed them the statue and told them that Grandfather Santa is going to show up with one gift every year. I'll hide him somewhere in the living room on Christmas Eve and the first person to find him Christmas morning will get Grandfather Santa's gift. I'll make it something small and simple, the kids are getting enough gifts as it is, but I though it would make a fun family tradition for our family, and a way to keep something Korean in our Christmas celebration. Grandfather Santa is currently sitting on an end table in the living room, thinking over what gift he's going to bring on Christmas morning. :) The kids are loving it.

Matthew has been really into Star Wars lately, and he has assigned us all Star Wars names. This morning he told me that when Clarissa gets here she'll get to be Princess Laia. That made me smile, I love that he's already including her in his thoughts and that he already considers her a part of the family. By the way, our big old lazy, fat cat is Jabba the Hut. Oh yes, everyone in this house gets to be someone. This morning Matthew (I mean Anakin, as he often instructs me to call him) instructed me (I'm Asoka, whoever the heck that is) to drive the pod racer home from Walgreens. Apparently driving 40 miles an hour was fast enough to win the race. I rock. :)

Monday, December 15, 2008

Winter Sonata

OK, I thought I was hooked on Korean movies before, but now that I've discovered Korean dramas I'm SERIOUSLY hooked!!

As I mentioned earlier, Shawn and I have started watching a Korean drama called Winter Sonata. It has 20 hour long episodes and basically it's just a 20 hour long movie. There's one plot and each episode picks up right where the last one left off. And it is GOOOOOOOD!!

The basic plot is that there is a group of high school kids who are friends and one day a new male student shows up, who is kind of brooding and mysterious. The main female character gets to know him, they fall in love and it's totally sweet. There is a bunch of other stuff going on with him in the meantime that the audience knows, but she doesn't, and when he finds out something shocking about his past he decides that he wants to leave Korea and move to the US with his mom. But on the way to tell the girl everything on his way out of the country he is hit by a car and killed. Or IS he??!

It picks up 10 years later and the girl has never really gotten over the guy, but she's now engaged to one of the other guys in her high school group, who was her best friend from childhood. She doesn't really love him, but he's her best friend and he really loves her, and everyone kind of expects them to get married.

But on the night of their engagement party, she sees someone walking down the street who looks just like the dead boyfriend from the past. She ends up meeting him, but he has a different name, says he's lived in the US his whole life and has no idea who she is. So is it a different person who looks just like the dead boyfriend, or did the dead boyfriend not really die?!

She's an interior designer and he is renovating a ski lodge and her design firm gets the contract for his ski lodge, so they end up working together and she's trying to figure out why he looks just like the old boyfriend, and she's second guessing her engagement to the other guy, and it all gets VERY complicated. Very, very complicated.

It's completely addicting, we were up until almost midnight last night watching it. We're 10 episodes into it, so we still have half of it to go!! I want to watch some of it really bad today, but I promised Shawn that I'd wait until he's home so we can watch it together. We're both totally engrossed in the story!!

Winter Sonata was a huge hit in Korea and then Japan caught on to it and it became a big deal there as well. It was the start of what they call the Korean Wave, which is when people from other countries started to realize how great Korean movies and dramas are and they started becoming popular all over the world.

The whole series takes place in the winter (hence the name) and through the first several episodes I kept commenting on all the huge turtleneck sweaters and big scarves that everyone was wearing. Then I was reading something online last night that said that show started a big turtleneck and scarf fad in Korea! Seriously, the wardrobe people must have bought out every turtleneck and scarf in the entire country for that show. If you played a drinking game and had a drink every time someone had on a different big turtleneck or big scarf you'd totally be drunk in the first 20 minutes.

So anyway, there's my pointless ramble about how good Winter Sonata is. It's beyond addicting! We're going to be up till midnight every night until it's finally over.

I've really enjoyed learning about Korean culture through the movies we've watched. Here's something that I love about Korean movies and I wonder if mainstream Korean culture is really like this. In all the amazingly romantic movies we've seen, no matter how close the couple is or how long they've been dating, you almost never see them kiss and there's never even a hint of anything else. I LOVE that fact, because I hate that American movies and television have gotten so raunchy, but I find it interesting. There was an episode in the show last night where the engaged couple have kind of a falling out and the guy refuses to take her home because he doesn't want her to leave him so he takes her to a hotel. Keep in mind they've been friends their entire lives, have been dating for a very long time and are now engaged. Up until then they hadn't shown them kiss and I got the impression that they never had. In the hotel room he gets upset that she's leaving and he grabs her, throws her on the bed and kisses her. That's all that happens, she gets really upset, leaves the room and that's it.

So a few episodes later there's a very dramatic scene and all their friends and family are there and the guy stands up and announces that he took his fiance to a hotel room (where nothing even happened) and the entire room gasps and his mom looks like she's going to have a heart attack and die. It was so funny to us that we totally burst out laughing, even though I'm sure it was supposed to be very dramatic.

Don't get me wrong, I totally applaud the fact that they seem to have such high morals, it's one of the things I love most about Korean movies. I love that the shows are so clean and sweet, I just find it surprising. I guess because you can't turn on an American television show anymore without seeing people hopping into bed together, I assume the whole world has become that way. It's one of the things I love most about Korean movies, but I wonder if it's really like that there. If so, I'm moving my family there tomorrow.

OK, so there's my long rambling review of how much I love Korean movies and how addicted I am to Winter Sonata. This blog has become less about adoption lately and much more about Korean movie reviews. I promise, tomorrow I will make an adoption related post. No more movie reviews for a while!

Saturday, December 13, 2008

For AuraLee

I was going to post about these collages when I made them, but I forgot to, so I'm answering your comment with it's own post. :)

A few weeks ago I decided that it was time to change the photos of the boys that I had hanging in the living room. I decided to do 16x20 canvases, but I couldn't find any recent photos that would work for that and my kids really weren't in the mood for a photoshoot, so I decided to do a collage of some of my recent favorite photos.

I designed these myself in Photoshop and had them printed at simplycanvas.com. I used Simply Canvas because I happened to have a gift certificate from them, and they turned out nicely, but I usually use Canvasondemand.com and that's who I usually recomend if you want to do a photo on canvas.

Anyway, here they are!



Lazy Saturday

I love days like this. It's cold and yucky outside and we really have nothing big planned today, so I think it's just going to be a nice day to stay inside, turn on the fireplace and relax. Shawn has to work until noon, but he'll be home in a few hours and then we'll find something fun to do around here. The boys are playing so nicely together today that I think maybe me and Shawn can start the Korean drama that we want to watch. Korean dramas are my latest discovery. They're kind of a cross between American soap operas, regular American TV dramas, and just a really long movie shown in segments. They have one specific plot line and as far as I can tell they don't really go on for a long time. The one that we're wanting to watch today only has 20 episodes. (not that we're going to watch the whole thing today!) It's almost like a long movie, in that there is a specific plot and when they've resolved it, it's over.

The one we want to watch is called Winter Sonata, and then there's another one called Summer Scent that we want to watch, because it has our favorite Korean actress in it.

I can't believe that I never discovered Korean movies and dramas until now! We think that all the best movies and TV shows come from Hollywood, but we're wrong! Koreans know how to tell a story, and in fact it's interesting to find out how many American movies are actually remakes of Korean movies, only the American versions seem to be missing the feel that Korean movies have. The American versions aren't as deep or as good.

Koreans love sad movies and they love really intense dramas. The storylines are always really complicated, there always seems to be a twist at the end, and the romance in Korean movies is a million times better than American romance movies. Korean movies are very deep and poetic. There's always an unrequited love or love triangle or a deep secret or there is some other complicated problem. There's always some awesome surprise twist at the end and it's always beautiful and romantic. American men in movies are too tough and cool to be romantic, but Korean men in movies are always doing things like writing poetic love letters. They're more openly emotional. I guess maybe that wouldn't fly in American movies.

I think we're more cynical here. For instance, Summer Scent is about a guy and a girl who are in love and then the girl dies and her heart is transplanted into another girl who had heart problems. Eventually the girl with the new heart meets the guy who lost his girlfriend and everytime the girl sees him her heart starts beating faster and she doesn't know why. Neither of them know that she's got his old girlfriends heart, but they start to fall in love. There are a whole bunch of complications and a twist at the end, and it's all very beautiful and sweet. Maybe in America everyone would roll their eyes and say how silly and implausible it all is. And it totally is, but still, so SWEET! Plus it stars Son Ye Jin who is my favorite Korean actress, so I give it extra points for that.

Anyway the more I learn about Korea the more I think I was born in the wrong country! I love Korean culture, I love everything about it. I love the language, I love Korean music, I love Korean movies, I even like Korean commercials (which I watch on Youtube, because I'm weird like that.). Maybe Clarissa doesn't need to move here, maybe we just all need to move there. :) I'm kidding, we're totally not going to, but I think I really could. I never wanted to live outside the US before, but the more I learn about Korea the more I love it. Their culture matches my personality.

I don't know how I got off on that tangent, but I guess that's what you get when I have nothing else to blog about! I'm sure I'll come up with something equally as mesmerizing to talk about tomorrow. :)

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Ho Ho Ho!

OK, we're getting a late start, but we're finally getting into the Christmas spirit around here. We usually put up our Christmas tree the weekend after Thanksgiving. But this year we've been super busy and I've been so beyond stressed about this photo shoot for the past week that we've just kept putting it off.

I finally decided that we've put it off way too long and today was the day! So when Shawn got home we pulled out all the Christmas stuff and got the tree up. After spending 20 minutes trying to figure out why half the lights were dead (isn't that always the worst part of the whole Christmas season?!) we finally got everything up and running.

And because I don't share nearly enough family photos here, here you go, the White family putting up the Christmas tree. :)






Mission accomplished

When I first accepted this photography assignment I kept thinking how lucky I was to be getting paid for something that I love doing so much. Well after all the stress I've been under this week, I don't think they paid me enough! I still loved taking the photos, but I've literally been a nervous wreck 24/7 since I got the job last Friday.

Yesterday I had to shoot the employee photos and the cover shot. The big boss man was coming at about 5pm, but I was so nervous about it that I showed up at about 2:45 to do some set up and some test shots to make sure I had everything perfect. I brought Shawn along and he was my assistant and my stand in for the photos.

One of the reasons I tend not to do a lot of portrait photography is because lighting is not my friend! If I had a studio set up with consistent lighting, where I could keep my studio lights in the same place, it would be fine, because I'd always be shooting in the same lighting conditions. But on location portraits where you never know what the lighting situation is going to be stresses me out, mostly just because I don't do it very often. I love still life and art photography where I can play with it as much as I want and take my time to be creative, but portraits have to be done quickly and really require you to think of your feet since every situation is different. It's a lot of pressure, and not the type of photography I'm used to. I CAN do it, I just don't do it as often, so I'm not as comfortable with it. It doesn't come as easy to me as shooting fine art shots and nature photography, which I've had years of of practice with.

The magazine is going to do some serious photoshop work on the cover anyway, so all I had to do was shoot the boss with a plain background so that they can photoshop it out. They have a specific theme planned for the cover, so I had to have him posed in a certain way so that when they photoshop it, he'll be in the right position. Easy enough, right?

First of all, the lighting in the building was complicated. The main part of the store has big windows and and multicolored mood lighting, and without doing a really complicated studio set up, that wasn't a good place to shoot. Then I tried the install bay, which is just a big garage, and the lighting was at least more even, but still not great. Then they mentioned that they have an unused basement there, so I tried some rooms down there for a bit, with no luck. I kept shooting Shawn to see how it was going to look and I wasn't really happy with any of the photos.

Finally I decided that the best place to take them was back up in the install bay. The problem was that I needed an open space to put my backdrop and there wasn't really a good spot. I finally found a spot that would basically work and I got some decent shots of Shawn, but the one big problem was all the overhead lighting putting huge light spots in Shawn's glasses. My only saving grace was going to be if the owner didn't have glasses. I asked someone if he did, and OF COURSE, he does. Crap.

So by then it was almost 5:00 and I was totally panicking. I wasn't happy with the lighting, I had no idea how I was going to overcome light in his glasses, unless I had him tilt his head at a ridiculous angle, and I was ready to have a nervous breakdown. Then the boss got in there, and I don't know if he has magical glasses or what, but that mans glasses don't show even one single light reflection in them. Not at all. It was almost like there was no glass in them. Freaky. I'm pretty sure that I want to track down his optometrist and kiss him.

So I got him posed correctly and I got the shot done. The guy was really friendly and cooperative and everything went fine. The pictures are not my favorite photos that I've ever taken, but they don't suck and I think they're going to work just fine for the cover. I'm sure the guy had no idea that five minutes before he got there I was having a total nervous breakdown, lol.

Then I did the employee shot. I asked them a couple of days ago if they could bring in a really cool car to be shot with, and BOY did they deliver!!! The have a customer with a Cadillac Escalade that is completely customized and BEAUTIFUL. It has SEVEN TV's in it, for Heavens sake! It was perfectly shiny and beautiful and made a really amazing background for the photos. Those turned out good, I'm happy with them.

All in all the whole thing went fine. They're not the photos I'm the very most proud of in my career, but they turned out fine, I think the magazine is going to be happy with them and frankly, at this point I'm just happy to be done! This type of photography is not my specialty, so I really had to stretch myself to get it accomplished. I learned a lot if I ever have to do something like this again, but hopefully I don't have to do it again for a while, because after this little adventure I'm sending my brain on vacation for a while.

I love shooting nature shots, still life shots and fun artistic shots when I'm on my own schedule and I only have to work with my own creative vision. I can spend days taking photos of the same flowers or the same bird feeder and never get bored of it. But assignment photography is a whole other thing. I still loved taking the photos, but being on a deadline and having to shoot someone else's ideas took a little bit of the fun out of it for me. Maybe just because it was my first time though, and I really second guessed myself too much. I was way outside my comfort zone and generally that's a place I don't like to be. I proved to myself that I can pull it off though, so I gained some confidence in the process.

But stress or not, it was actually a really fun adventure and I'm glad I had the opportunity to do it. I don't want to make it sound like it was a horrible experience, because it definitely wasn't. It forced me to think outside the box, try some new techniques and trust in my abilities a little more. I like to play it safe and stick with the things I'm familiar and comfortable with, but this was a good opportunity for me to try something new and prove to myself that I could do it and that stepping outside my comfort zone wasn't going to kill me after all.

Yay for me. :)

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Photo frenzy day five

It's the last day of my magazine shoot! Yay!

Everything has gone pretty well so far, but today is the big day that I have to shoot the owner for the cover and do some employee shots. I woke up at 3am and laid there and worried about it until about 4:30. I'm going to sleep well when this is all over!

So far it's going well, although I've never done a shoot like this before, so I don't really have anything to compare it to. The photos won't win any awards, but I think they're what the magazine wants. There's only so many ways to shoot the install bay of a car audio store. I'm used to doing more artistic shots, but I don't think the publisher is looking for art in this case, so I'm keeping the shots pretty standard.

On another note, my Korean tutor came over yesterday and we had such a fun time! I learned a lot and we ended up inviting him to stay for dinner, and almost convinced him to stay for a Korean movie. He offered to make us a Korean dinner one of these days, which would be really fun! I think he's going to be a good friend for our family, we really enjoyed having him here. I think he's going to be coming over once a week.

So between spending most of the day shooting for the magazine and spending my evening learning Korean, it was a super busy day yesterday, but also a pretty sucessful one. I feel like I accomplished a lot. I learned to count to 10 in Korean and didn't screw up the magazine photos. Two ingredients for a pretty good day. Let's just hope that I have the same success today!!

Monday, December 8, 2008

Photo Frenzy day three

In the history of the world I don't think anyone has ever stressed over a photoshoot more than I have over this one. It's going fine, but I still keep waking up in a cold sweat worrying that they're going to hate my photos. I was over there again today and I got some pretty good shots, so I think that they're going to be just fine, but the trickiest ones are still to come. On Wednesday afternoon I have to shoot the employees and then shoot the owner for the cover. That one is really freaking me out a bit. I think it will be fine, but I swear I'm going to have a party on Thursday when this is all over. I'm way excited about this job and I can't wait to see my work published, but doing something like this for the first time is always a bit nervewracking. I wish that I could share the photos I've taken now, but the contract I had to sign says that I can't show them until after the magazine is published. I'll definitely show them once I get a copy of the magazine though.

On another note, I have the best husband EVER!! He called me on his cellphone on the way home from work to tell me that he had a surprise for me. Actually, I think it was really supposed to be a Christmas present, but we always have a really hard time waiting until Christmas to exchange gifts with each other. We're funny that way.
When he got home he handed me a pretty red box and inside there was a beautiful adoption necklace! It's called a tangled heart necklace, and it's three intertwined hearts, meant to signify the birth mother, the adoptive mother and the baby. It looks like this:
It was such an incredibly sweet gift, I'm absolutely crazy about the necklace and I'm crazy about the sweet husband who gave it to me. :) Clarissa and her birth mother are always in my thoughts and it's nice to have a phsyical reminder of them as well.
So now I'm off to bed, hopefully to dream about something besides disasterous photo shoots and magazines with no photos in them. Maybe I'll dream that Clarissa is finally home and then I can wake up with a smile on my face. :)

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Photo frenzy

So I'm still a little bit overwhelmed with the fact that I'm doing a shoot for a national magazine! The night that I was offered the job I had bad dreams all night about photography. I kept trying to take pictures of things, but my camera wouldn't work, I misunderstood the assignment, my equipment was too heavy (and for some reason I was pregnant!), and then I gave up and went to get in my car and someone had stolen it. So I tried to call Shawn on my cellphone but I couldn't get the number right and the buttons didn't work. I woke up in a horrible panic wondering if I was completely crazy to think that I could shoot for a magazine!

Because I sort of fell into photography by accident and am mostly self taught, I sometimes feel like I'm totally faking it, lol. I don't have years of training, a degree in photography or hundreds of hours of apprentiship. I became a photographer totally by accident.

I wanted better photos of my kids so I bought a nice camera. Then I realized that I didn't know how to USE my nice camera, so I found a professional photographer who agreed to let me pick his brain and he was awesome about teaching me and letting me follow him around watching him work. Then my kids got sick of me practicing on them so I started taking photos of random things like toys, birds, flowers, etc. just to practice. As I found new things to shoot I realized that I needed different equipment for different types of photos, so I bought a few lenses, lighting, filters, and eventually a nicer camera when I outgrew the first one. It was purely entertainment for me to study a technique and then learn how to copy it. Things like sillouhettes and shallow depth of field shots were things I taught myself purely to amuse myself, not because I was planning to sell them. When I was going through my anxiety problems it was the way I calmed myself down. Focusing on how to get a complicated shot was how I kept my mind from worrying about other things. The worse the anxiety got the harder I worked at the photography. It was simply a distraction and an outlet. Photography is very calming to me. (well, except when I'm having nightmares about it!)

Then to my amazement people started asking how they could buy my photos. I never intended to sell them, but I certainly wasn't going to turn someone down if they wanted to pay me for them! So then I realized that maybe I wasn't half bad at it so I took more photos and those sold too. By then I had several people asking me if I had a website, so I made one. It snowballed and snowballed and the next thing I know a magazine is calling me to shoot their cover story! Frankly, I'm still a little dumbfounded by the whole thing. :)

So I've been seriously panicking for the past couple of days and totally second guessing myself. What did I just get myself into?!!

Thank goodness for Shawn, who has given me about a hundred pep talks over the past couple of days. I don't know what I'd do without him. He's been my voice of reason for years. I'm not doing the main shoot until next Wednesday, but I decided to go over there this morning and just do some test shots, get a feel for the lighting and make sure that I know what I'm doing. And to my surprise I DIDN'T totally blow it! I know what I'm doing, why did I psyche myself out so badly? The store isn't that big, so there aren't a ton of shots that I have to get. The lighting is a little tricky, but manageable. I'm going to be just fine. I'm going to go back over there on Monday or Tuesday and hopefully get the rest of the store shots I need and then Wednesday afternoon I'm shooting the employees. In a month or so I'll have a fun souvineer to look at of of my first magazine shoot and life will continue. No need to panic and have nightmares, right?! :)

So now that I've taken a few shots I'm not really panicking anymore. Right now I'm mostly just excited about the opportunity ahead of me. This will be a fun adventure, plus it will give me something exciting to blog about! Wasn't it just two days ago that I was saying how boring my life was right now? I totally take that back! :)

Thursday, December 4, 2008

HOLY CRAP!!!!!!!

I just booked a national magazine photoshoot!!!!!

I'm practically hyperventalating over here, but let me try to tell the short version of the story.

I just got a phone call from someone who works for a national car audio magazine and they're doing a cover story on a car audio store in Boise. He was online looking for Boise photographers and came across my website and he liked my guitar photos so much that he offered me the job!!

What I'll be doing is shooting the interior and exterior of the store, there is a list of shots that I need to get of different equipment, etc. It pays pretty well and I'll even be shooting the cover!!

Holy. Crap.

I'll keep you posted!

Yay!

Ok, maybe I did have something interesting to post today after all!

So I've been doing the Rosetta Stone program to learn Korean, and it's going pretty well but because it's an immersion program there is no English explainations or translations at all. That's supposed to be the best way to learn a language, and I agree that it probably is, but with no English explainations on sentence structure or anything, it sometimes gets tricky and I occasionally get lost.

So when I get lost I call Shawn at work and ask him if I can talk to one of his employees named Larry, who is Korean, and he always has the answers. Today I totally got lost so I called to talk to him and we had a good conversation about sentence structure and formal vs. informal speech and it was so helpful that we decided to get together once a week!! He hasn't lived in Korea for years, so his Korean is a little rusty, but he wants to brush up on it anyway, so he really liked the idea of teaching someone. He used to be an international communications major as well, so he knows a lot about learning a second language.

I'm totally excited to have my own Korean tutor!! I'm going to keep doing the Rosetta Stone program, because for the most part it really is working, but he can come over once a week and answer questions and clarify things a little so that it's less confusing. In exchange I'm doing a photo shoot of him and his girlfriend for free. I love exchanging skills.

So YAY! There's my exciting news for the day! I might just tackle Korean after all!

Thursday thoughts

Ok, this blog has totally gotten boring lately. I was just reading through it and I realized that I really need to come up with more interesting things to discuss! Life is pretty boring around here right now though. The kids are back to school, so I've mostly just been home getting things ready for Christmas.

I'm a huge online shopper. I rarely go to stores in town these days, I like to hunt for things online. So last week I put together Christmas lists for the boys, I went to Amazon.com and in about an hour I had my Christmas shopping done! No standing in line at the store, no driving all over town to find what I need, I just sat in my jammies and got everything done.

So that's all out of the way. The last couple of days I've been contemplating how I'm going to decorate the Christmas tree this year. About six years ago I bought some pretty Christmas tree decorations, like gold ribbon and beads, and I've been decorating the tree the exact same way since. It literally looks exactly the same every single year. This year I decided that I'm bored of that, so I'm trying to come up with some new ideas. Unfortunately I'm totally a creature of habit and I'm not very creative when it comes to decorating. Basically I came up with some red beads instead of gold beads. Oh yeah, I'm really getting wild now!! It's like the time I decided that I was bored with my jeans and t-shirt wardrobe so I decided I needed a change. After searching for my new look, I went REALLY wild and crazy and I bought some BLACK jeans! I know, I really need to calm it down, right?!
Anyway, it was too much of a change so I returned them. :)

So today I don't have a whole lot of anything planned. OH!! I know what I was going to post about!! I bought Clarissa some clothes today! Woohoo!

I've been super careful about not buying too many things for Clarissa up until now for a lot of reasons. Part of it is probably just to protect myself, because if I put together a nursery and buy a closet full of clothes and then for some reason the adoption falls though, I think it would kill me to have to get rid of all those things. I don't really see that happening, but you just never know. And partly I've waited because I'm SO freakin' excited to buy girl things that I think if I had started six months ago I would have enough stuff for 46 little girls by now.

But today I was at Babystyle.com and they were having a good sale (30% off the clearance prices with coupon code HOHO30, in case you were planning to shop there today) and they had a few cute things that I just couldn't resist. I feel like now that we're getting closer it's OK to start buying a few things. I'm still forcing myself not to go crazy and buy a whole wardrobe, but it is fun to have a few things. I'm so used to having boys that I really don't even know where to start with girl clothes. It's been fun to pick things out though. We need a little pink in this house!

So there's all the stuff I have to talk about today. Still boring, right? I think it's time for us to take another exciting family adventure or something so that I'll have something interesting to blog about. Just wait until we finally get our referral and then I'll have a million exciting things to blog about, I promise!! :)

Monday, December 1, 2008

Korean movie of the week

Ok, I'm feeling better about life this afternoon. The closer I get to the wait for Clarissa being over, the harder it gets to wait and the more impatient I get. Then when I hear that the wait might be longer it feels like my life is coming to an end for a minute. But I gave myself a pep talk, reminded myself that it IS going to happen eventually and it will all be worth it in the end.

And then to really cheer myself up I found a funny Korean movie to watch and it was SO CUTE! It's called "My Sassy Girl" and it was hillarious and so sweet at the end. I love Korean movies. So if you're in the mood for a funny, sweet and totally romantic movie, you have to watch it. It's adorable!

And the wait goes on...

I was just in the middle of making this blog post and stopped for a minute to check something on my Korean adoption board and there was a post from someone saying that some of the agencies just announced that the wait times have gone back up for Korea, in some cases significantly. Each agency has it's own timeline, so it doesn't necessarily mean that our wait times have gone up, I haven't specifically heard from our agency yet, but we're with a smaller agency and they get less referrals that some of the big ones, so if the big agencies are getting fewer referrals, I'm worried about what that means for our agency. I have no idea what this means for us, if anything, but it's making me really nervous right now. The roller coaster of emotions this adoption has put me through is making me a little crazy. At this point I can't stand the thought of being told that the wait might be longer.

I had a whole other topic ready to post, but this news has made me a little grumpy, so I'm going to wait and post it tomorrow. I'll see if I can find anything else about new timeframes this afternoon.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

You have to watch this!!

I know I already posted today, but I just saw this video on Yahoo and I loved it so much that I had to share it. I'm such an animal lover, this video made me cry!! (I'm also a big crybaby.:))

(darn, I can't get the video to play in the post for some reason. If it won't play for you and you want to watch it (trust me, you do!) try clicking on this link to see it: http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=10849410)


Giving thanks

We just got done eating our Thanksgiving turkey and our tummies are full! Before I lay down on the couch to watch a movie and promptly fall asleep I thought I'd better blog before I let the day go by!

Today has been a good day. Most days around here are pretty good, but today was especially good. We didn't have any company for Thanksgiving and we didn't go out of town like we normally do, so it was just us. For the past few weeks I've been feeling kind of bummed about that, because I actually really like big family Thanksgivings, but today with just our little family sitting around the table talking about what we're thankful for, my heart was full. I love our sweet little family. I love sitting at the table laughing and talking with our kids and sitting next to my sweet husband. Life is good.

So while we were eating we had the annual "tell us what you're thankful for" discussion and it was fun to hear from the kids. Matthew is thankful for Heavenly Father and Jesus, our family, Santa and all the people in our neighborhood. Josh is thankful for our family, our church, our pets and his friends.

Today I feel like I have so many things to be thankful for thatI don't really even know where to start. So here is my very imcomplete list of things that I'm thankful for.

I'm thankful for my kids, who make me smile every single day. I couldn't ask for better kids. They are such a blessing in my life.

I'm thankful for my husband, who is always there for me, always understands me and happily puts up with me, even when I'm a little difficult to live with, which is often. :)

I'm thankful for our church. Without it my life would be very different.

I'm thankful for Clarissa's birth mother. Somewhere out there there is a woman hurting for her baby right now and my heart breaks for her. I hope that I can raise her daughter to be the kind of person that she would want her to be.

I'm thankful for whoever is keeping Clarissa warm and safe right now. I couldn't help thinking as we were eating our Thanksgiving dinner today there there was someone missing from our table. I'm thankful for kind people in the world who take babies into their lives and love them, even knowing that they'll eventally have to give them up.

I'm thankful for my friends, the old ones and the new ones. I've learned something from each and every one of them.

I'm thankful for the birds in my tree. Nature is amazing and God has given us beautiful things to look at and enjoy.

I'm thankful that I live in a free country, where I'm free to live and worship as I choose, whether people agree with me or not.

I'm thankful for green grass, warm blankets, good books, ducks who lay eggs in my yard, rainy days and all the other simple pleasures in life.

I'm also thankful for a million other things that I don't have the time to name right now. Life is good.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Back from Twilight!

I've been waiting for this weekend for quite a while; it was the opening weekend of the movie Twilight!

We trade date night babysitting with some friends of ours, so we arranged to have the kids go play at their house for a while today so that we could go see the movie. We got there an hour early and there was already a line forming! I love the excitement at the theater when big movies open. We've waited in line on opening weekend for all the Harry Potter movies, the Star Wars movies and a few others. It's fun to be in the theater with all the really die hard fans. There was actually a preview for the new Harry Potter movie at the beginning of Twilight and apparently the Twilight crowd is also the Harry Potter crowd because everyone clapped and cheered at the preview. I love that. It's fun to feel like everyone in the theater is all in on the excitement together.

So anyway, the movie was awesome and I already can't wait to see it again. I really applaud Stephanie Meyer for writing a story that is so clean. It's nice to see a movie that isn't full of language and sex. Movies like that are unfortunately becoming harder to find these days. I think the fact that Edward and Bella can't really be together is way more romantic and exciting that if it had just gone like most movies and there were in bed in the first hour.

I thought they did a great job with the casting! When I first heard that they were making a movie from the book I thought that there was no way that they were going to find anyone who could play Edward and be as stunning and perfect as they described in the book. I was wrooong, they found a perfect Edward! Is it wrong to be 33 years old and have a crush on Edward Cullen?? :)

So that was our fun afternoon at the movies. When we came out of the theater it was raining and by the time we got home it was snowing! Now that we've hit November I'm totally ready for the snow. I love it when we're home on the weekend and it's all cold and snowy outside. I'll take any excuse I can to turn the fireplace on and curl up in a blanket. I'm thinking that today might be a good day to start rereading the Twilight books!

Friday, November 21, 2008

ONE YEAR!!!

Today is November 21st and we have now officially been waiting for Clarissa for one year. November 21st last year was the day our paperwork went to Korea and we were officially put on the waiting list.

We've officially been waiting one year but we actually started our adoption journey many months before that. I think that it was about May or June of last year that we finally made the decision to look into adoption and we started requesting info from agencies. I think that it was around July that we settled on Korea, paid the application fee with our agency and got the ball rolling.

The application process to adopt internationally is brutal. It's an incredible amount of paperwork and other hoops that must be jumped. Doctor exams, background checks, social worker visits, papers that have to be notarized...it seemed like that part of it went on forever.

So even though I'm celebrating our official one year wait today, the wait has technically been more like a year and a half. Frankly, it SEEMS like it's been more like 36 decades. It's been so long that I can barely remember the days when we WEREN'T waiting anymore. It seems like this has just always been an ongoing process.

But today is a good day. I remember last November 21st, wondering where we'd be this November 21st, and now here we are. And really, as I look back over the past year, not a lot has changed. Maybe this year has been the calm before the storm! The past several years of our lives have brought a lot of changes to our home and our family, but this past year was actually fairly uneventful. We took some fun little vacations and had a lot of great family time, but not much changed in our lives this year. I'm glad for that actually. The previous three years were literally just a whirlwind of change and a fair amount of stress accompanying it. It was nice to kind of sit back this year and enjoy our family and look forward to the changes ahead of us.

So now I wonder what we'll be doing next November 21st. By next November Clarissa should be getting settled into our family and hopefully the adoption stress will be mostly behind us. This time next year there will be dolls on my Christmas shopping list! This time next year we probably will have just celebrated Clarissa's first birthday and I hope that we'll be finishing up the requirements to have the adoption finalized with the courts. This time next year I'll be taking a family Christmas photo and I'll finally not be left with the feeling that someone is missing.

I have so much hope and excitement for the year ahead. This adoption has really consumed my life for such a long time now and I'm so excited about the adventure ahead. I hope that this time next year we'll be moving on to the next phase of our lives, happy and content, blessed with three beautiful children. I look forward to the day when this blog and this journey to adoption becomes just another chapter in the book of my life. One day it will be fun to look back on all of this and remember this year and all that we went through to bring Clarissa home.

So here we are, one year older, one year wiser and one year closer to Clarissa. If I can get through a year I can get through the next 4-6 months until we can finally see a picture of sweet Clarissa and then finally hold her in our arms. The wait is winding down and I have nothing but excitement for what is to come.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Tuesday Update

I talked to the lady handling our adoption at our adoption agency today and I got some information that I thought I'd update you on.

Right now we're #8 in line with our agency. What that means is that there are seven families ahead of us, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those seven families have to be matched with a baby before it's our turn. When a baby is ready for adoption, they look at the profile of family #1 first and if their profile doesn't match the baby's situation then they look at family #2 and so on until they feel that they have the best family for the baby. For instance if family #1 has requested a girl and the next baby available is a boy, they'll skip the first family and look at the second family. Sometimes the birth mother requests a family of a certain religion or sometimes the baby has a health issue that needs to be matched up with a family able to handle it, etc. So it doesn't necessarily mean that we're 8 babies away from being matched.

But what that DOES mean is that we're getting closer!! Our agency gets an average of two referrals from Korea a month. Sometimes as many as five and some months none. The bad news is that January and February are their notorious slow months and that's right when we're going to be close to the top of the list. So I'm betting that we won't hear anything until March. Maybe sooner, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up. It's still sooner than we originally thought it would be, so I'm happy. :)

The other thing I'm really excited about is that I think there's a bigger chance that we're going to take the leap and actually travel to Korea!!! One of the things holding us back was the cost. This adoption is costing us an absolute fortune and we just weren't sure that we were going to be able to pay the extra cost to travel. But when I was talking to the agency today she said that it's actually not that much more to travel than it is to have Clarissa escorted to the US!

It will cost us about $2,500 if we have Clarissa escorted. That covers the airfare for Clarissa and the escort and whatever other fees they deem necessary. If we fly it will probably cost us about $2,500 total for airfare for Shawn and I (we won't be taking the boys), and then all that's left is food and lodging. We only have to go for three days and there is a guest house at the Korean adoption agency that we can stay in for $28 a night as long as it's not being used, which is SUPER cheap, and then food prices are about the same as they are here.

So it will cost a little more for us to travel than to escort, but not so much more that it's out of our price range or anything. It's still totally doable! The more we talked about it the more it seemed like the way to go. Plus she said that escorting takes longer than travelling to pick up the baby. If we travel we can go as soon as all the paperwork is complete. If we escort we have to wait for them to find someone to escort her, which can take anytime from a week to a month to arrange! I think by the time the paperwork is done and she's free to leave Korea I'm going to be climbing the walls waiting to go get her. Another month would be unbearable torture.

That DOES mean that I have to take the big scary flight though. Fifteen hours over the ocean!! That scares the crap out of me! Here's what I do when I'm on an airplane. I sit in my seat with my nails dug into Shawn's arm, just waiting for the plane to crash at any moment. Even the slightest turbulence signals certain death, I'm just sure of it. And then when we finally land I'm always pleasantly surprised that I'm still alive. :) I've flown several times. I've flown to Las Vegas, Orlando, Memphis, California, and when I was 19 I was a nanny in New Jersey and I flew back and forth between New Jersey and Idaho several times. I tolerate it when I have to. I absolutely love being on vacation and I love going to new places. It's just the getting there and getting home that I hate, and when you live in Idaho you pretty much have to fly to go anywhere because we're too far away from anywhere interesting to drive.

But flying halfway across the world is different than flying across the country! I've never been out of the country before and I've never flown over the ocean. The only way I even sort of tolerate flying is because I know that at least there's a possibility of making an emergency landing if we have to. But there's no emergency landings in the ocean! The thought of that many hours in the air over water seriously panics me. I think the second I get on the plane I'm going to take a large dose of Benedryl and I'm going to attempt to sleep for 15 hours. :)

If this is what I have to do to get Clarissa into my arms ASAP, then I'm going to do it. Everyone I know who has traveled to Korea to get their baby says it's the greatest experience ever. So I can do it, right? Thank you to the two commenters in my last post who encouraged me to fly. It helped! It probably won't kill me right? How often do planes crash in a blazing ball of fire into the ocean?

Every single night I lay in bed trying to imagine where Clarissa is and who is with her. What a great experience it will be to actually go there and find out for myself. Meeting her foster parents and getting to explore Korea a little bit will be an absolute amazing experience.

And who knows, maybe between now and next summer someone will create a teleporting device and airplanes will become obsolete. It could happen, right?! :) Ok, maybe not. I'll just have to suck it up and fly.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Korean update

OK, so I'm on day four of learning Korean. Rosetta Stone does NOT start out slow! So I feel a little overwhelmed with it right now, but in theory I totally agree with the immersion method. I spend my entire lesson learning in Korean, there's no time wasted listening to someone speak to me in English. I am learning a lot though and I think that once I get further into the program I'm going to start retaining more and more of it. I estimate that if I go at a normal pace and really work at it, I should be able to finish the program in six months. In six months I hope that we're getting ready to get Clarissa home. If I really DO learn to speak Korean enough to get by, it might be the big push I need to actually make the trip to Korea instead of having Clarissa escorted to the US. My heart is telling me to go to Korea, but my brain is telling me that I'm too scared to fly to handle a 15 hour flight over the ocean. Fifteen hours! We're going to Memphis in the spring and I'm already panicking about the five hour flight, and it's a flight I've taken before. We flew there last February and I survived. I don't know why I'm convinced that I can't do it again. Every second on an airplane is torture for me.

BUT I'm in love with the idea of actually getting to go to Korea. To meet Clarissa's foster mother and to be able to tell Clarissa later all about where she came from is important to me. Plus I've just fallen in love with Korea through everything I've read and seen lately. It seems like a beautiful place that I really do want to visit.

So we'll see. I change my mind about it daily and it's still months away. When the time comes, we'll see who wins, my brain or my heart!

Friday, November 14, 2008

"The Classic" soundtrack

So aside from The Classic being the best movie ever, it also has the best soundtrack ever! I've added a little music player to the side of my blog and if you click the play button it will play a song from the soundtrack. I'm not completely clear on the name of the song because I've seen it translated a few different ways. The name on the track I found on the esnips.com website listed it as "More Love...", but on the lyric translation site I read it listed it as "If We Are in Love, Then..." so I don't know what it's called exactly.

I decided not to make it automatically play when you open my blog because I know that's annoying, but you have to promise to listen to it at least once, because it's an absolutely beautiful song!

Here are the translated lyrics, which make more sense once you see the movie!

As I appear over the top of the hill you see me
I don't need to speak, you already know what's on my mind
Without ever knowing why we came to be together as if just by chance
I won't change my mind just as a rainbow doesn't stop until it reaches the heavens

If we are in love we shouldn't worry about our hearts becoming lonely or broken
I just believe that this is not the end
So lately I've woken up to the fact that love can't be denied
It seemed like you came to me by chance but I know that it was fate that brought us together
If we are in love we shouldn't be afraid of anything pulling us apart
I just believe that this is not the end
This is not the end...

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Five things I learned on Thursday

1. Korean is a hard language to learn.

2. Josh can cram an amazingly large amount of junk in his closet to give his room the appearance of being clean.

3. Donuts make a really great bribe for an 8 year old and a 5 year old.

4. Tonights episode of The Office wasn't all that funny, but Pam's back from New York! Yay!

5. I don't care if Korean is hard. I'm going to learn it anyway.

So there.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Afternoon update

I spent about two hours learning Korean today! Rosetta Stone is a pretty cool program. It is a complete immersion program, they don't teach you anything in English. They want you to figure everything out in Korean from the very start. So they're not just having you memorize common phrases or anything like that, they want you to really learn the how's and why's of the whole language. After two hours this morning I can now tell you in Korean all about how the the boy eats dinner, the boy reads a book, the girl runs and the girl drinks water. Oh yeah, I rock. :)

When I first started I felt like I was totally in over my head, but it ended up not being as hard to understand as I thought because of the really great way they teach it. The hardest part was pronouncing some of the sounds. My mouth doesn't make some Korean sounds! It has voice recognition software, so you have to repeat words and they'll tell you if you're saying it right or wrong. I was OK for the most part, but there were a few sounds that I just can't make. To ME it sounded like I was saying what they were saying, but I guess not. It's tricky.

I'm excited to keep practicing though! I'm sure it will take me months to learn enough to even feel comfortable with a very basic conversation, but I'm up for the challenge.

And then I got the mail today and I was very excited to find that a t-shirt that I ordered online from a Korean store came today! It's just a while t-shirt that says The Republic of Korea in Korean on the front and there's a Korean flag on the back. It sounds stupid, but the reason I ordered it is because it actually ships straight from Korea! To get it in the mail today knowing that a few days ago it was actually in Korea was oddly exciting. I'm such a nerd. I just wanted something that came from Korea. Not a Korean t-shirt from an American store, but a Korean shirt that really came from Korea. For some reason anything Korean just makes me feel closer to Clarissa these days. It's like if Korea becomes a real place to me then Clarissa becomes a real person who lives there. That probably doesn't make sense, but it's working for me. It's making the wait easier.

ahn nyeong ha se yo

Ok, I've finally done it. I ordered Rosetta Stone and as of today I am officially learning to speak Korean.

Ever since I became so interested in Korean music and movies, it's driven me crazy that I can't understand it. I LOVE Korean culture and I think the language is beautiful. S0 this morning I decided to take the plunge and attempt to learn to speak at least basic Korean. I figure if we do end up going to Korea to pick up Clarissa, I'm guessing that it will be in 6-8 months from now. If I practiced a lot for the next 6-8 months, maybe I'd be able to carry on a very basic conversation with Clarissa's foster mother and at least ask strangers how to get to the bus stop, right?!

I'm going to give it a try. I love to learn new things and I think this will be a fun adventure. I'll keep you posted on my progress! Wish me luck!

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Cry your eyes out, part 2

Ok, I totally take back what I said on Friday about Ditto being the best movie ever. I just watched another Korean movie called The Classic, and that is my NEW very favorite movie ever.

You absolutely MUST watch that movie! I cried my eyes out for the last 15 minutes of it, but it's just a fantastic movie with a beautiful ending. Koreans know how to make a movie, I can't believe I've been missing out on them all this time!

So go find The Classic on DVD or watch it online at http://www.veoh.com/. It's the most beautiful love story ever, but it will totally break your heart.