Woohoo, two posts in one day! :)

It's almost like when I was waiting for the referral, right?! People had to finally tell me to stop making two posts a day because when the second post of the day popped up they always thought it was because we got the referral, lol.

Ok, so we just got back from taekwondo. Have I mentioned recently how much I love that taekwondo school? I love Master Lee, I love his wife, I love the two assistants and I love the other Korean people we've been lucky enough to meet there. That's a lot of love. :)

I've found that Korean people get REALLY excited when they realized that you're interested in their culture. Master Lee and his wife know how interested (and by interested I mean slightly obsessed!) we are with Korean culture and they've really gone out of their way to encourage our interest. They're so sweet to our family and so great with Clarissa. They've become great friends of our family.

We've also met some other Korean people at the taekwondo school and they've been really nice to us as well. There is a really nice Korean woman there who has grandkids at the school and she always makes a point to talk to us about Korea when we see her. I had told her in the past that we were interested in learning Korean and today she told me that a Korean Baptist church in town offers free Korean language classes for kids during the school year!! They're done for the summer, but in the fall I'm going to check it out. Josh absolutely loves learning Korean and he's really excited about the idea of taking classes. I would also absolutely LOVE for Clarissa to take them when she's old enough!

When we first brought Clarissa was home I was actually a little nervous about meeting Korean people and having them find out that we adopted from Korea. There's a big push in Korea right now to close the international adoption program there because Koreans aren't all that thrilled with their children being sent overseas to be raised by non-Korean families, which I can totally understand. (The problem is that adoption isn't very socially acceptable in Korea, so they have no choice but to send their orphaned children overseas, which is a topic for another day.)

Anyway, I was afraid that Koreans might be unhappy seeing a Korean baby being raised by caucasian parents, but what I've found has been the complete opposite. Every Korean we've met here has bent over backwards to be nice to us when they find out that we have a Korean child. They fawn over Clarissa and are so excited when our kids speak a few words of Korean to them. I have always found Koreans to be very warm and friendly anyway, but they're even moreso when they realize our connection to the country. It makes me happy that we have so many people in our lives who can be role models for Clarissa as she gets older and can teach her things about her birth country that we may not be able to.

When we first applied to adopt we didn't really know any Koreans at all and there is such a small Korean population here that I was afraid that we would never really get to know any. But now it's amazing how many Korean friends we have now, both here and in Korea. When we applied to adopt we knew that our lives were going to be blessed with a baby, but we didn't realize how blessed we were going to be with such wonderful friends.

I came home feeling so warm and fuzzy about our Korean taekwondo friends that I had to blog about it while it was on my mind. I'm grateful that Clarissa's adoption has brought so many wonderful new friends into our life.