It’s hard to believe, but there’s only one full day left of our time in Seoul (Wednesday). It has been a great experience, overall. In fact, I told Joleen Monday morning (right before we went to visit Ethan) that if we went home now, this would have been a great trip/vacation. But, of course, that’s not the real reason we came. We came to get Ethan!

We’ve enjoyed our time Seoul, and we will miss it. There’s a lot more we could do here.

That said, now that we have Ethan, the purpose of our trip has been fulfilled, and we’re looking forward to being home and having the next 9 weeks to devote to him and the transition in our home.

Tomorrow, we’ll sorta hang out with Ethan. We’ll try to get out. We’d still like to go to O’Sulloc Tea to try some of their green tea items. But our plans will depend largely on Ethan and how he’s handling the transition on our first full day together. The cold weather may also impact what we do, especially since we have to walk wherever we go (we’ve been getting tons of exercise this week!).

Well, it’s going on 12:30 am here in Korea. I’d better get some sleep. We’re told Ethan *normally* wakes up between 2:00 and 3:00 am. Of course, I’m not sure what “normal” is going to be for a while!

If you haven’t read the previous post (First Hours with Ethan) yet, please do so. In that post, I mentioned attending a small group gathering of people from The Holy Flames Methodist Church (BTW, the Methodist churches in Korea are part of the Korean Methodist Church; I’m not accidentally leaving out the word “United”).

Originally, we believed that we would visit Ethan Monday (we did). We also expected to pick up Ethan Thursday morning on our way to the airport. That changed Monday when we were told that we would get Ethan Tuesday afternoon. Because we thought we had Tuesday and Wednesday on our own, we had planned to use those days for our cross-cultural experience (CCE).

When we connected with Jung-Sun, our host from Holy Flames, we said we’d need to be back by 4:00 pm, thinking that would be the end of our CCE. However, we got the impression that it would have been insulting for us to cancel out on the family hosting the small group we were scheduled to attend this evening. So, we said we’d try.

Earlier in the day, our host family took us to the border with North Korea where we got to see North Korea from South Korea. We rushed back for our appointment to pick up Ethan and were actually a few minutes late due to the heavy Seoul traffic (I plan to write about driving/parking in Seoul, at some point in the future; there’s probably no place like it!).

When we picked up Ethan, our host family waited for us then drove us to their apartment for a few minutes (Ethan was still screaming, at this point). Around 6:00 pm, we walked to another church family’s apartment in a nearby apartment building where we were served an amazing home cooked Korean meal, which was an extra-special meal prepared for guests. And it was excellent!

After the meal, we went down a couple floors to another church family’s apartment where they conducted their small group meeting — reviewing Rev. Jun’s sermon from Sunday, responding to a few discussion questions, and then praying for one another.

They finished up a little early and surprised us with a cake to celebrate Ethan’s new life with us. It was a special time — a night we will *never* forget!

To be honest, I was concerned about sharing this night with anyone else. I thought I would rather have experienced this time with just the three of us. At the end of the day, though, I believe it was an incredible blessing from God. In a time of transition, they provided some familiarity — looks, language, and Korean food. They held him, fed him, and prayed for us. Our Korean church family is amazing, and we are grateful to God for blessing us with them!

Ironically, we came to Korea with for completely separate tasks — adoption (the main reason, of course) and our cross-cultural experience. Today, these two separate things came together in a way we couldn’t have planned or imagined!

You may want to take a moment and read and/or review a post we wrote a week ago Sunday called, The Takeaway, which looked ahead to the time we would pick up our baby and take him from those he believes to be his family.

We’ve had Ethan now for about 6.5 hours. He’s sleeping now, and that’s a good thing. Here’s what the past 6.5 hours have looked like in a nutshell …

Yesterday, I posted a photo/post called 1,000 Words. For the first hour and a half tonight, two words dominated: absolutely brutal. Leaving SWS with the baby and loading him into a van wasn’t too bad. His foster mother shed some tears, but it was a very smooth hand-off. We could tell Ethan was wondering what was going on, though.

I took a photo of Joleen holding Ethan in the van. Seconds later, reality hit Ethan. He was being taken from his home. He cried and screamed at the top of his lungs for the next hour and a half. He climbed toward the window as if he wanted out. He cried/screamed so much that his side windows became completed fogged up.

I know, you’re all thinking, “It was only an hour and a half. That’s not too long!” Yeah, but that hour and a half felt like an eternity. It was very painful.

We spent the evening with new friends from The Holy Flames Methodist Church (more on that in the next post). Around 6:30 pm, Ethan calmed down and began to warm up to us. He was also around a lot of people tonight who loved him and supported us during this difficult time.

It was an exhausting night — for us and for him. In fact, he fell asleep around 8:30 pm at our small group gathering in someone’s home (he normally goes to sleep between 10:00 and 11:00 pm). However, when we got back to our room and put him in the crib, he woke up and started crying and screaming again. Fortunately, this time, it didn’t last too long, and he simply cried himself to sleep.

We expect that when he wakes up in a few hours to be another difficult time. But we hope it gets better over time.

We believe it will be a good thing that we got him today instead of on the way to the airport. I can’t imagine going through that in and airport and on an airplane. As Ethan cried/screamed, I kept thinking, “There’s gotta be a better way to do this.” I dunno, maybe there isn’t. But, man, that was brutal!

We’re only a few hours into this. We know it will get better with time. We just don’t know what the time line will be. We just can’t imagine the fear, the trauma, and grief Ethan must be experiencing in the early hours of this transition!