I have two little pieces of good news from the Korea program to update everyone on. First, the Korean government has finally decided to start issuing emigration permits again after a two month hiatus. So this means that shortly they will be allowing the first babies of 2012 to leave the country with their adoptive parents. Hopefully, this continues to flow throughout the year and no more long breaks are taken since this causes travel wait times to increase down the line for everyone in the program. Secondly, I confirmed two weeks ago that we are now #5 on the girl wait list. We moved up three more spots from my last adoption update due to, once again, three families switching to boys ahead of us. So, hopefully the girl referrals will start coming in soon because there are only four families ahead of us. Feels so close, yet so far away!!!
In other news, we met with the domestic private adoption attorney two weeks ago. It was very informative and a bit overwhelming as he basically told us everything we need to know about how to do a private adoption in the U.S. We decided that if we were to pursue domestic adoption, this is the route we would likely take rather than signing with an agency. We just like the idea of not limiting ourselves to birth moms at a particular agency, rather be able to market ourselves on adoption websites nationwide and have hundreds of birth moms be able to choose us. It is a lot more work since you are basically finding the birth mom yourself, but we like how we will be in the driver's seat, rather than an agency having complete control. With all that said, we are not ready to embark on this journey until we see how the Korea program pans out for the rest of 2012.
