Entries from February 2008 ↓

If bringing a child into our family and dealing with the adjustment issues that go along with an international adoption from Korea were not enough, it’s time for both of us to resume our work on our dissertations on Tuesday (God willing!).

As some of you may recall, we had just submitted a rough draft of our final two chapters to our mentor the day before we received the call that Ethan was ready for pick-up in Korea. While we were in Korea, our mentor, Dr. Russell West, emailed us his feedback.

We will work on making the necessary improvements and revisions so that we can have complete mentor-approved dissertations to submit to the D.Min. office within the next 1 to 3 weeks so that our defenses can be scheduled in time for graduation in May (we *hope* this is do-able!).

We know we are really cutting it close, and that we really need God’s help with juggling our dissertation work with caring for, and spending time with, Ethan. One thing is for certain: these two journeys (adoption and dissertation) have tracked each other extremely closely over the last 13 months.

We trust that God will continue to work out all of the details, so that we can put our Doctor of Ministry chapter behind us!

Ethan’s big challenge right now is having to train two new, sometimes clueless, parents!

Think about it, Ethan had invested six months (of his 8-month-old life) in training a foster mother (an experienced mother of three grown children) to read his signals and meet his needs. Now he has to start all over with two newbies.

To help with the transition, we were supplied information by the foster mother about sleep schedule, eating habits, and things like that. Of course, now that we’re home, in a different time zone, where the food is different, we’re really having to learn everything new anyway, it seems.

Ethan has developed some signals to indicate different things and we’re in the process of learning what they mean. Sometimes when he’s hungry, he smacks his lips. Yesterday, when he wanted a bottle, apparently, he started crawling toward the kitchen. When he’s getting sleepy (but doesn’t really *ever* want to go to sleep) he rubs his eyes with his hands or on a blanket.

But this training process that we’re involved in is a two-way street. As we build a stronger relationship with Ethan, and as we become more confident about what we’re doing, our challenge will become ‘being trained by Ethan’ to ‘training Ethan.’

We’ve been pretty lenient in our first week together, mainly because our first priority has been survival. But now that we’re getting to know each other (and getting well), it’s time to start our own training program.

Part of this training will involve working on Ethan’s sleeping schedule as well as his diet. We will take Ethan to his first doctor’s appointment here on Wednesday, where we’ll probably try to get some help with these two areas.

The training continues …

One of the things I was fascinated by while we were in Korea was the special mirrors that were on many of the vehicles, mirrors I’d never seen before (see photos below).

And there’s a good reason for these mirrors — in the second largest metropolitan area in the world (with nearly 4 times as many people per square kilometer as New York City!), there’s not a lot of extra room for driving and/or parking.

We didn’t drive while we were in Korea, but we were in several vehicles driven by other people. We saw drivers get through some tight squeezes we never thought we would get through. They parked in places I never would have even attempted. Thus, the reason for these extra mirrors.

We came away thinking you’d have to have ice in your veins to drive in Seoul. One woman, one of our guides (and interpreter) at Kwanglim Methodist Church, who went to college in Australia and worked in Canada and recently returned to Seoul, told us that people say if you can drive in Seoul, you can drive anywhere!

Take a look at the mirrors in these photos. You can click on one of them and click “next” or “previous” below the photo to cycle through them. Also, look for my descriptions below.

We would appreciate your prayers for our family’s health, especially that Ethan doesn’t get what we had last night!

Joleen and I had the flu last night. My case of it was pretty severe — it was the sickest I’ve ever been. I spent 6 straight hours in the bathroom.

Thankfully, though, Ethan seems to be well, so far.

Our first full day home, I woke up around 7:00 am, after 10 hours of sleep, and wrote the four posts on the blog (while both Joleen and Ethan slept till around 2:00 pm) that I scheduled to appear every few hours, including one this morning. I had no ability to write a post this morning!

Overall, today was a good day with Ethan, even though Joleen and I laid around on couches most of the day. Ethan does pretty well with entertaining himself. Mostly, he likes to grab on to things (e.g. end tables, TV stands, anything!) and pull himself up. As he was once described by his caseworker in Korea, “He’s a very active little guy.”

The roughest things for Ethan now are the times he wakes up during the night. That’s when we hear his terrified crying. While he normally gets up once during the night (according to his foster mother), he’s been up three times so far tonight, and we have several hours to go before he gets up. But, during the day, he laughs a lot, and seems to be adjusting well.

Anyway, pray that Ethan doesn’t get what we had!

In our first few days with Ethan, we’ve talked openly about the struggle that taking Ethan from his foster family and bringing him into ours has been.

However, we want to be clear: we were never concerned about the long term. We’ve always believed that Ethan will adjust, in time. While in Korea, our concerns were mostly immediate — getting Ethan home by way of a very long trip.

It was painful to watch, at times. Occasionally, we’d ask ourselves, “How long can he go on like this?” At the time, we didn’t know the answer to that question.

We also know that while people, and perhaps especially children, are pretty resilient, the reality is, trauma leaves a lasting mark on people, even on babies who will someday not remember the events that caused the trauma.

So, our concern hasn’t been so much, “Will Ethan survive this and come to know we love him?” Our bigger concern is how do we need to respond so that this trauma does not have a lasting negative impact on Ethan, and even, how can we respond so that Ethan can actually become a stronger person as a result of this traumatic experience.

In fact, it’s probably an even more important concern for children than it is for adults. As an adult, I have a better chance of processing trauma that happens to me, but children may not be able to fully process what’s happened to them. The adults around children must respond, and help them respond, in ways that minimize the damage caused by the trauma. If done well, the trauma can actually make them *more* resilient! (BTW, this was the thinking behind our Shaping a High AQ Culture a while back.)

Actually, this is a concern we all should have about the things we go through. None of us can completely control what happens to us, we only get to choose how we respond, and how we respond matters!

We did a couple things pretty regularly while we were in Korea: 1) check the blog for new comments, and 2) check our blog statistics.

We enjoyed reading the comments; it gave us a real sense that we were not alone while we were in Korea. And judging by some of the comments we’ve received, it helped others feel as if they were with us, too.

By checking our statistics, we’d knew how many “hits” or views our blog received each day. As you can see in the image here, our statistics really started climbing when we went to Korea and spiked on the days we met Ethan and brought him home. Not surprisingly, the blog’s biggest day was “gotcha day,” February 12 when the blog received 531 views.

To put that into perspective, our old blog (willis.blogs.com) received about 10,000 hits from January 2007 to January 2008 (about 30/day). This new blog (williswired.com) has received more than 3,600 in about a month (125/day).

As we said before, we blogged in Korea for a couple reasons: 1) to help friends and family experience this part of our journey with us, and 2) to be a resource for other adoptive families who may come across our blog (our blog statistics reveal that people come to our blog through Web searches related to adoption). At some point in the near future, we plan to post some lessons learned along the way that may be helpful to other adoptive families (especially those adopting from Korea).

Thanks for making this a more meaningul ride for us!

Here are a few things that may help you make the most of this blog …

Comments
You can read and/or write comments on any post we write on this blog. Simply click on the comments link at the bottom of each individual post. If there are no comments, it’ll say “0 Comments.” If there is 1 comment, it’ll say “1 Comment,” and so forth.

At the moment, there is also a listing in the sidebar of the most recent comments that have been posted anywhere on the blog. You can click on post titles (after the commenter’s name) to go directly to a particular comment. There were about 70 comments on the posts we wrote while we were in Korea. If you haven’t read the comments yet, we encourage you to go back and read through them.

If you would like to write a comment on any post, simply click on the comments link at the bottom of the post you want to comment on, fill out the form at the end of the post (your name, email address which won’t be shown publicly, and write your comment in the text box provided; if you have your own website, you can type it in the URL box, which will turn your name into a link to your site).

ShareThis
Also, you may have noticed the ShareThis link at the bottom of each post. After clicking on the link, readers can share the post with others by way one or more of the social bookmarking sites listed. Or, you can click on the “Send” tab to email the link (of the post) to someone. It’s an easy way to share any of the content on this blog.

Recent Visitors
Finally, there’s a map in the sidebar that posts a dot of the general location of the 100 most recent visitors to the blog. It’s interesting to see in what parts of the world people find this blog!

Search
To search this blog, type in the search box in the sidebar. This is especially helpful if you remember reading something but can’t remember exactly where it is. Just type in a key word or phrase.

If you have questions about these features, or anything else about this blog, this would be a good place to ask. Just write a comment on this post!

We got up early on February 14, 2008 and left for the airport at 7:00 am (Korea Time). When we arrived at the airport in State College 22.5 hours later, it was still only 3:30 pm, February 14 (Eastern Time). It was the longest Valentine’s Day ever!

Thanks to whoever posted the “welcome home” banner/balloons and shoveled our steps/sidewalk!

If you have followed our story in recent days, you know we were very concerned about the trip home. As it turned out, the 40 hours we had with Ethan leading up to the trip must’ve helped (not too mention, everyone’s prayers!). Under the circumstances, Ethan did extremely well — from getting up/dressed early, to the hour-long bus ride to the airport, to the time in 4 different airports in 3 different countries, to the 14 hours in the air — over the course of an entire day.

Ethan did struggle (and made his presence very known!) on the first plane (mainly during ascent and descent). Amazingly, though, he only had one episode on the second flight, the long 11-hour ordeal. By the time we got to the third/final flight, on board Northwest’s smallest plane, he was out before takeoff and we had to wake up him an hour and a half later in State College (see photo of Ethan after the long trip in the State College airport, as he waited for me to find the car buried under snow in the parking lot and make adjustments to his car seat).

One of our prayer concerns was for smooth connections, including getting Ethan into the country through customs when we arrived in Detroit. Fortunately, all of our planes departed and landed on time (if not early). With our short layover (if you can call it a layover) in Tokyo, we literally went from one plane to the next — not a good thing when the next flight is 11 hours long (Ethan didn’t get a chance to stretch out).

And, we must say, we are very happy with our experience of getting through U.S. Customs in Detroit (actually, Detroit probably has a lot of experience with international adoptions; Detroit is the pick-up point for parents who choose to send an escort instead of going to Korea themselves).

We went through 3 different customs agents — the first one was for American citizens returning to the country, and the last two were for Ethan. The 3 (female) agents were all very kind and accommodating. And by the time we got through all that, we still had 45 minutes to stretch out before the last flight home.

Once home, Ethan spent some time checking things out (see photos).

While Joleen and I didn’t get much sleep on the trip (I didn’t get any; Joleen dozed off a little on the long flight), Ethan slept through much of the air travel. I’m not sure what jet lag is supposed to feel like. I feel good (other than the headache I woke up with) after getting 10 hours of sleep last night (I can’t remember the last time I got that much).

Joleen said Ethan was up a couple times overnight but I never heard him (well, once, but Joleen was already up ). Ethan’s clock has gotta be all messed up, though — Korea Time is 14 hours ahead of Eastern Time, plus he slept a lot of the way home. But he will probably adjust fairly quickly.

We look forward to bonding with Ethan, especially over the next 8+ weeks of our parental leave.

Over the next few days, we’ll try to wrap up our reflections on our Korea experience. Watch for posts on …

• Things we learned on our trip to Korea
• More reflection on our Sunday experiences at Holy Flames and Kwanglim Methodist churches.
• Milestones (dates we’ll always remember)
• A fun post about my fascination with car mirrors in Seoul.

Thanks for your prayers, for following along on this adventure, and for all of your comments! These posts, along your comments, will become part of the story we share with Ethan over the years to come, especially as we celebrate his “gotcha day” every February 12. Thanks for being part of his story!

We would certainly appreciate your prayers as we travel and bring Ethan home with us on Thursday.

Here’s our schedule …

We’ll check out at early in the morning (7:00 am here), 5:00 pm, Eastern Time. We have an hour bus ride to the airport where our plane is scheduled to leave at 11:05 am (9:05 pm, Eastern Time). We should land in Tokyo a couple hours later.

After an hour-long layover in Tokyo, we’ll embark on the long 11.5 hour flight to Detroit. Then, after a less-than-2-hour layover, we’ll take a short commuter flight home to State College, where we’re expect to arrive at 3:30 pm on Thursday (Eastern Time).

Please pray for safety, of course. Also, pray especially for Ethan, that he handles the trip as well as possible. Pray that God gives us wisdom and patience. Pray for our fellow passengers and the crew, that they will be supportive and understanding.

Pray also for smooth transitions in Tokyo and Detroit and that we have no problems with customs and immigration, especially in Detroit where we have a fairly short layover. We have all of our legal paperwork for Ethan, but you never know what snags might come up in that process!

We’ll post a report on the trip sometime after we get home. Thanks for your prayers!

It’s 8:20 pm here (Wednesday) and Ethan has been with us now for about 28 hours. There have been some glimmers of hope, but overall, it’s been a fairly rough ride so far!

The night went pretty well. Ethan woke up around 3:00 am and we both got up to feed him. He was a little scared, but okay, for the most part.

This morning, we didn’t really want to get up before we had to, so we waited till Ethan got awake, which was around 7:30 am. For the first few minutes, he was in a good mood, but as he got more awake, he cried and screamed again, this time for about 4 hours, minus a 20-30 nap.

A woman (who is here to adopt her second child) in a neighboring room came and knocked on our door shortly after we got up and offered a toy rattle. She said we have “a screamer.” Joleen said, “That was nothing!” (what she heard so far was minor compared to the previous night, as well as what would follow).

While there have been some very rough spots today (he is grieving, after all, and experiencing tremendous fear, naturally), there have also been some glimmers of hope. We’ve ventured out a few times today, carrying him in our Ergo Baby Carrier, which is probably one of the best baby-related investments we’ve made so far, as we’ve taken on a 24.3 pound baby!

On our first walk, a trip to E-Mart to pick up some supplies, he eventually went to sleep and was out until we returned home, somewhere around an hour later. Since he normally only takes short 20-30 minute naps, we assume he’s pretty exhausted. In fact, he normally goes to sleep between 10:00 and 11:00 pm, but tonight, he went to sleep a few minutes ago (of course, we don’t know what the rest of the night is going to be like).

FYI, Ethan has an interesting diet, at least we think so. He refused to eat much this morning, but for lunch, Joleen fed him rice with dried seaweed mixed in. We’ve been told that rice soup is his main food, which he normally eats about three times a day. He also eats fruit (tangerines and strawberries, etc.). According to the foster mother, he doesn’t “do formula well.”

We’re hoping for a more restful night and a good trip home tomorrow. There could be some more challenges along the way, but we’re *hoping* these episodes become fewer and further in between! He is certainly living up to his Korean and American names, which mean strong, particularly his lungs!

As you may recall from our post, The Takeaway, we said …

While we believe he will adjust and come to love us, too, the ugly part of this experience will be the period of time it takes Ethan to go from viewing us as kidnappers to viewing us as parents.

We’re still very much in the middle of this process!

But, just a word about the glimmers of hope: there have been times today when Ethan has been happy — smiling, laughing, shaking his head from side to side (which he does when he’s happy). We know he’ll eventually be okay, but right now, we just want to get him home and begin to make that adjustment!