happy birthday to me ... a 3D JD!

I woke up early ... like 3 am early.  Guess I was a bit excited.  We spent the morning getting dressed; prepping our gifts for the foster family, social worker and agency director; and going over our list of questions we wanted to ask his foster mother.  We were instructed to go down to "Office 101" at 9:50 am, so we could complete some paperwork.  Then we'd meet JD at 10am.  I was calm, cool and collected until 9:48am.  Then I started freaking out ... for real.  Just ask David :)

After the paperwork, we walked, with our social worker Bo, to a room filled with toys.  There was another family just exiting that room and a line of about 10 foster mothers with children waiting for their turn to go into the room for the "1st meeting".  Bo beckoned to one of the women and she popped out of line ... and THERE HE WAS, the littlest prince!!   WOW!!  It's so funny because I cried before our meeting, and I'm crying as I'm typing this blog, but I didn't cry during our one hour visit with him.  I was just so filled with joy and wanted to enjoy every second that it didn't even cross my mind.  Plus I didn't want to scare the little bugger!

JD did so well.  He never cried and didn't really show any stranger anxiety.  He just stared at us intently at first, then started playing with toys.  Initially, when we tried to play with him, he would just stare at us with a "who the heck are you guys?" kind of look. 

here's the "who the heck are you guys" look

In the beginning, JD stayed fairly close to his foster mother.  We kept playing with him and didn't get too "in his face".  We used this opportunity to ask his foster mother questions about his likes/dislikes (Bo translated for us)

FM is telling us what, and how, he likes to eat   

Then, finally, we had the breakthrough smile, while playing with a wire/block toy, and it was all downhill from there. 

look at that smile!

We got tons of smiles after that and lots of fun playtime.  He seems pretty easygoing and he loves to move around and check things out.  And he even danced for us a few times.  For a while he was more interested in a vacuum cleaner in the corner of the room than he was in the toys.  He went over to it a couple of times and made vacuum cleaner noises (hmm, this mama thinks she may have a little helper for the housework)! 

He smelled absolutely yummy - David commented on it a number of times after our meeting on what a wonderful "baby" smell JD had.  And of course he had the cutest little nugget of a butt :)   

he liked the cookie eating noises I made

 

 playtime with daddy 

 "D" is soaking up that yummy baby smell :)

 

 

  

... and he let me hold him at the end of our visit

At the end of our visit, we were told our 2nd visit with JD will be Wednesday afternoon at 2pm. Yay!  We then went to meet with the agency director at Eastern, Dr. Kim.  Our visit with her was shared with 2 other families:  a woman from MN picking up her 2nd child (she lives not far from us, she gave us her contact info) and a family of 4 from CA who were there to visit their adopted son's (10 yr old) birth country and his foster mother.  Dr Kim told us the history of Eastern and of adoption in Korea, as well as a bit on the social history of Korea since the Korean War. 

We were then invited to have lunch with her (something we thought wouldn't happen until Thurs, if at all).  We went up to the lunchroom and it was filled with other people.  We shared a table with the CA family and another couple from WY who were there adopting their child.  It was a lovely lunch and the food was delicious.  My favorite?  Bibimbap (rice, veggies, might have been a little meat).  We spent well over an hour with these people and had a wonderful conversation.

By the time we were done it was 2pm.  We headed out to check out Itaewon area in hopes of finding some gifts for JD - no luck there in our gift hunt :(   We then walked over to Namsan Park, which is right in the middle of the city and HUGE.  It is a beautiful, very well maintained nature area with hiking trails and walking paths.  It reminds me a little of Muir Woods outside of San Fran.  This park is also where the N Seoul tower is (picture a Seattle space needle type bldg).  We took a cable car up to the tower so we could enjoy the view from the observation deck.  WOW, this city is so much bigger than we realized ... not sure why I'm surprise as it has one of the top 5 largest populations in the world.  Seeing it from up here really gives you a feel for just HOW big it is.

Namsan park from the air

What an AWESOME birthday!!!   JD is no longer just these one dimensional pictures that I've been looking at since last August.  He's now my JD in 3D:  an adorable, huggable, snuggly, squirmy, totally mobile and laughing little 13 month old.  And he's ours :)