Happy 4th!

             We wish our families and our friends a happy and safe 4th of July!

1 Month Home!

Wow, yesterday was our 1month home mark! Time sure flew! And YES we've had so much fun with Mr Wiggly! His transition is going much smoother than we could have ever hoped for! Thank you God and thank you to all who have been praying for us. We are having what I would call normal temper tantrum issues. Nothing too alarming. The battle of the wills has begun! We are now settling in to being parents and no longer baby sitters. Our little guy has brought us so much joy every day. We have slowly introduced him to extended family and friends. We are still being careful and vigilant to "over stimulation" - probably more so myself. We've had our first post placement visit by our social worker and she seemed to agree that Mr Wiggly appears happy where he is. Of course, he put on a really good show when she came. Way to go Mr Wiggly! Our doctor repeated 3times how fortunate and lucky we were to have gotten such a well taken care of baby and a good looking one too! We sure have been blessed. He was happy to report of Mr Wiggly's normal labs. Plus one special need kicked to the curb according to lab results! Praise God! Here are a "few" pics from our first month...

 Yeppers! He's a happy camper when there's food in front of him! Any more spaghetti left Daddy? What about some dessert?

He gets the bottle 3 times a day. He is now mostly on whole milk. He now drinks his night bottle on UD's lap.
He also freaks out when the phone rings. His eyes shout "That's mine, that's mine, that's mine!"

 He loves the water... bath, pool, creek, dish water, faucet, bird bath or toilet bowl water! He cannot wait to get into his bath.

 Mr Wiggly and his Pororo airplane - his favorite toy. Our foster mom sent this with us along with a bunch of other toys.

 Here is his 2nd favorite toy, thanks to the W. family.

He also loves just playing with boxes and anything else he gets a hold of. 

 On nice sunny days, we take him out for a wagon ride around the neighborhood. The wagon, courtesy of friends at MAC.

 Hanging out with Daddy. Mr Wiggly loves sound books. He has no interest for reading books at this time but we're encouraging it slowly at a time.

 Here he is with cousin T. at last. He also loves playing with this refrigerator alphabet toy. Except every once in a while, we find some of the letters in the trash.

 Want to take a wild guess what he's doing in the laundry basket?

 Stink! Why does mommy always has the camera on when I'm messing with no-no stuff?

At the end of a "calmer" day, this is how our living room floor looks like. Mommy isn't complaining at all!

 The night UD came home after his first day back to work, Mr Wiggly was all eyes on his Daddy! It was the cutest, sweetest thing to see. He showed Daddy some lovins by feeding him and "enduring" some kisses from Daddy.

 Above, Mr Wiggly, supervising Daddy, making sure the hose got put away nice and neat.

 Above, doing "Kunji, Kunji" with mommy. This is sort of the Korean version to Patty Cake.

 Happiness dangling from Daddy's arms and riding Daddy's shoulders.

 And PJ too!

 And GM too! He loves Patty Cake with GM...

and GM's horsey ride.

 Our Emperor baby on his throne!

 Working on his Mr GQ look!

 "Happy to be me".... this is our Mr Wiggly to the T. Weeelllllll, unless he doesn't get what he wants... but we're working on it.

Mr Wiggly is learning to understand English. Yesterday, Aunt D. taught him high five, he's learned to squeeze his nose (sometimes mouth) when we say beep, beep, and he's been waving left and right when we say bye, bye. Otherwise he jabbers in Korean. In fact he said a new Korean word yesterday but not sure what it meant if it means anything.
I leave you with a "few" more pics: a peekaboo series and a lemon face series -----
Until yesterday, this was the kind of peekaboo he would do - hide behind something other than the hands.

 Then yesterday, after waking up from his afternoon nap....

 wait for it............

           peek......

            a...........

           booo.............

             Yaaaayyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!

 And then the lemon face! He tried his first lemon last night despite fair warning he wouldn't like it...

 LOL!!!!!!

 Uh...... you call this good food???????

 And yet he laughed with us and ate that thing for another 5minutes or so. He is just hilarious! He gave us such a good laugh last night. Good laughs or not, we love our little guy so much! As I rejoice in having our little guy home for a month, my heart is also saddened for my friend C. who has to wait a little longer than expected to go get her little girl from Korea. Please join me in lifting her and her husband in prayer as they continue to wait for their call.
Thank you for enduring the few pics and thanks for sharing in our joy!

Special mention

While we were in Korea, we actually got to see and read UD's records. As most of you know, UD was adopted through the same agency we are using. This worked out really well for us. Our SW in Korea asked if UD wanted to see his records. He said yes; she told us to just walk in to their Post Adoption Services office which happened to be on the 4th floor of the guest house we were staying. How convenient huh? We were worried since we didn't bring any of his pre UD ID's or anything like that. But Mon, 5/23/11 we walked in to 
the said office. One of the ladies promptly stood up and asked how she could help us... we told her what we wanted and after looking up his Korean name, she asked us to come back the next day at 2pm so she could have time to gather all his records. Just like that! Less than 15min! I was very impressed. Our SW told us all of the ladies at the 4th floor spoke fluent English and so we asked for another favor. To see where we could buy a 3 pronged adapter for our stinking laptop that was deader than a doornail by then. And one of the other ladies, hurried around looking for a "3 pronged converter" and she goes, "here... you can borrow this; just make sure to please return it ok?"  We were just floored.. pleasantly floored at how nice everybody was at the guest house.

So we went back the next day after taking pics of our friend's BEAUTIFUL girl, and a quick Insadong Market visit. GM and UD went over the records pretty thoroughly with Ms. L.'s help. Everything was translated in to English. We asked if we could take pics of the documents, and Ms. L goes, "I'll make copies of all the records for you to take home." How sweet is that huh? She even gave us an extra copy of one of his referral pics. I had to bow out after a while with Mr Wiggly in tow since Mr Wiggly wasn't going to take all this reading and just sitting around for nothing. So we waited outside... him making friends with the rest of the ladies on the 4th floor. We also did a round of climbing up and down the stairs to the 5th floor - where we were staying. This kid can crawl up the stairs man! He can't quite go down them yet. BUT he did find our room without prompting.
Anyways, back to UD's records, we didn't find out anything new as far as birth family. We did find out which orphanage he was in. It is now a school these days. From what we could see, it didn't take very long for him to be assigned to his forever family once he was "admitted" to our agency. Less than a year actually. So now we have copies of a couple of UD's well baby checks and assessments, along with our Mr Wiggly's. I think that's pretty cool! We actually have Mr Wiggly's original records now, which is awesome d awesome! It was pretty special to hold in our hands UDs original records. UD has asked me not to mention too much about what's all in the records so I will honor that. But here is one of his referral pics!

                                                  He looked so sad, but isn't he stinking cute!

 This is his naturalization pic courtesy of Topeka Journal. GM said if not for a girl adoptee who also got naturalized that day, this pic would have been on the paper. But the paper gave them the pic anyway. Cool huh? And a few months back, I got permission from Topeka Journal to get the pic scanned at Wolfe's for a bigger size pic. Even cooler huh?

                                                  Baptism in to Christ. This was at the Chase County Lake I think.

 Here he is now... getting introduced in to fatherhood. I say he's handling it pretty well. Well, actually he is doing wonderfully. This daddy gets up in the middle of the night, THE SECOND he hears Mr Wiggly scream bloody murder. This daddy is washing and fixing our Mr's Wiggly's bottles, making meals (as always), not to mention doing his BIG share of poopy diapers. This daddy has jumped in to fatherhood just like a pro. Might I add, this daddy did his fair share of paperwork and stalking the forum and emails while we were waiting for THE CALL. Did his fair share of calling Washington DC too when our son's visa was being processed. This daddy shed his fair share of joyful and painful tears while waiting to have a child.

Mommy AC might be the entertainer all around, but Daddy UD makes our Mr Wiggly laugh the most and smile the most.

I should have saved this for Father's day, but ... happy advanced Father's day Daddy UD! Mr Wiggly and I love you. Mr Wiggly's mommy is so proud of you.

AC

PS: I would also mention, special thanks to L and S for allowing us to share in your kids' lives, and learning from you and allowing us to "practice" with your kids. Now we finally get to apply what we've learned. Not as easy as you guys made it look!