Category: Korean Adoption

Korean Adoption

Matched!!

Stoyk

As many of your have heard, we have been matched with the sweetest baby!! This happened WAY faster than we thought it would. We have been told all along that it would be 6-12 months to receive a match, and we only waited 3 weeks! I can’t even explain how excited our family is and how blessed we feel that it happened so quickly. We truly believe all the hiccups we have encountered along the way were so we would be ready for this specific child!

A lot of people have been asking why we didn’t post on Facebook or Instagram what the child’s gender, age and name is. We were asked by our agency to keep all identifying information off of social media, and we want to respect our child’s privacy. Please know that we can’t wait to share more once we have our baby in our arms.

Now for the question we get everyday… how long is it going to take to get the baby in our arms? Well, our agency has told us it could take 6-12 months to finalize our adoption and bring our child home. Right now we are waiting for the following:

1st – I-600a approval- this gives us permission to bring a child in to the country. We are hoping this will come any day now. We need this permission to move forward with the next steps. I am a little obsessed with checking the mail! – Approved one day after I wrote this post!

2nd – I-600 approval- this gives our specific child immigration approval

3rd – Emigration Permission Submission- this could take 2-4 months. This is the 1st step in the child’s exit process.

4th – Emigration Approval- this take 2-4 months during this time the Korean court will be reviewing our file for final adoption approval. This is the step right before submitting our file!

5th – Travel to Korea for 1st Court Appearance- we will receive notice about 3-6 weeks before we need to travel to Korea. When we are there we get to visit with our baby, complete court paperwork and appear in court. We will be there about 1 week.

6th – Pick up our Baby!- about 4 weeks after we get home from our first trip, we will travel back to Korea for our visa interview and to bring our sweet baby home!!!

When I look at this list of things left to do, it looks so short! We have been in this process for the past year, and we are so thankful for where it has taken us. We are praying really hard that the rest of this process goes by quickly, and we get our sweet baby here soon!

Thank you all for your love, support and prayers! Keep praying this process moves along quickly, and we get to Bring Home Baby Stoyk soon!

Korean Adoption

Big News!

Stoyk

We have some pretty exciting news to share… We are officially a waiting family!!! All of our paperwork (dossier) was sent to Korea today, and we are now waiting to be matched with our sweet baby! We are over the moon excited to finally have our file in Korea. This is a really huge step in the adoption process, and although we know there will be some waiting ahead of us, we know the wait for our baby is going to be so worth it.

Now what? Now we wait. There is no way to predict how long it will take to be matched with our child. Obviously, we hope that it will be a quick wait, but realistically, we are hoping to be matched by the end of summer. That would mean that by the time all of our other paperwork is finished in Korea, we would be brining our child home this time next year. Again, we know there are no guarantees, but that is what we are holding on to right now.

We appreciate all of you prayers so much, and at this point in the process, we ask that you continue to pray for our sweet baby and their birth parents. This is an exciting time for us, but across the world, a family is making a very difficult decision. We pray God lifts them up as they go through the grieving process, and that they find some peace knowing we will love their child with all of our hearts.

We are one HUGE step closer to Bringing Home Baby Stoyk!

Korean Adoption

Humbling Experience

Stoyk

If you know us well, you know that we are not great at asking for help. We are stubborn and try to do everything ourselves. Whether that be hauling tree branches for hours to avoid calling a professional to pushing three boys in the stroller to get a run in instead of getting a babysitter, we aren’t great at asking for help. Well, this process has really forced us to lean on our friends and family, and boy have they shown up when we have needed them!

At the very beginning of this process, we needed someone to watch our kids for an entire day so we could go to Eau Claire for an initial interview. This was very last minute, but our friends stepped in and took care of all three boys for us. My mom has watched the boys while we have done countless hours of paperwork, education hours, and meetings with our social worker. We have had friends write us letters of recommendation, fill out questionnaires about us as a couple and family (more than once), signed off as a witness on our important papers, watch our classes so we could leave early to attend meetings, and prayed for us during this long, hard process.

Of course we have expressed our thanks to these people, but really just saying thank you isn’t enough. These people have all played an important part in our journey to bring Baby Stoyk home, and we will never be able to express how thankful we are for that. So to all of you that have helped, asked how things are going, and are praying for our family, we are so thankful and feel very blessed to have you all in our lives. Thank you for helping us continue to make steps toward bringing home Baby Stoyk.

Adoption, Family, International Adoption, Korean Adoption

Progress… Finally!

Stoyk

We had our FINAL home study visit this week. What a relief! We spent all of Monday night cleaning, and when I say cleaning, I mean under the fridge, the oven, the junk drawer, and inside cabinets. Because she was totally going to look in all of those places right?

I was worried all over again for these two visits (one Tuesday and one Wednesday) because we have a new social worker, since we are now working with Bethany Christian Services. We had only ever spoken to her on the phone one time, and now she was going to come and decide if were were suitable parents for a sweet baby from Korea. I didn’t know how thorough she was going to be, but I was pretty sure she was going to judge me on my socks-with-no-matches basket.

Our first meeting was on Tuesday night after school. Thanks to an awesome coworker, I was able to leave school a little early to make sure everything was ready. The boys came home, and we all played Play-Doh while we waited. Once she arrived, I felt better right away. She was very kind, sympathetic to all we had gone through with our previous agency closing, and has a great connection to Korea. We got right to work on a mountain of paperwork while the boys continued to play. She was here for about 2 1/2hrs. She spent some time talking to Eric and I separately, and interviewed the boys. Gus’ interview didn’t last too long. He won her over right away with his sweet smile and by holding her hand. When you have three boys ages 6, 3, and 1 you never really know what they are going to do or say, but I am happy to say they all did great! She left us with a bunch of paperwork to do, so Eric and I sat down for a few hours after she left and worked on that to be ready for the next day.

Eric and I took half-a-day off on Wednesday morning, and she returned to finish up our last visit. We had a few more things we needed to go over, she needed to check our fire alarms and extinguishers, and she needed to do a walk-through of our house. She left us with more paperwork and some education hours we need to complete before our home study can be completed.

So what is next?

We have 5 additional education hours that we need to get in before our home study can be written up. We have a book to read for that and will be writing up a book report on it. If you know Eric at all, you know he is not the biggest reader, so he is super thrilled about this assignment. 🙂

Once we get our education hours done and submit the final paperwork, our social worker will, hopefully, approve us and write up our home study. After she writes up our home study, she will send a copy to our placing agency, AAC, and they will need to approve it. Once the home study is completely approved, we will be ready to get I600 approval (immigration approval). This might take a month or two, but once that is approved we will be ready to submit everything to Korea and wait for a match! It finally feels like we are getting closer to getting to see our baby!

We are so grateful to everyone for your support and prayers. A lot of you have been reaching out and asking to donate to help cover the high cost of agency fees and travel. We so appreciate this, and we are looking in to the best way for people to do this. We are doing everything we can right now to save every penny for this along with working on applying for adoption grants. The cost of adoption is one of the largest reasons people choose not to adopt, and we have said from the beginning that we will not let it be a barrier for our family.

Thank you all again for your love and support. Keep the prayers coming, and I hope to be able to update everyone again soon. We are one step closer to bringing home Baby Stoyk!