Meetings and Reunions

Tomorrow, we meet our future son, Ji-Seok, for the first time.  We’ll meet him at the adoption agency, with his foster mom.  We’ll only have an hour or so with him.  Taking him for the day isn’t going to work out.  It’s disappointing, but it’s hard to say whether he’d really be okay spending the day with strangers anyway. 

It’ll be interesting to see how Heidi deals with meeting him and then saying goodbye.  For me, I think it’s too unreal to be very hard—he’s still just a cute kid to me.  The whole “my son” thing isn’t really something that’s sunk in yet.  Or maybe it’s something I’m holding in reserve for after we really have him.  I don’t think that’s true for Heidi, though.  We’ll see.

Later in the day, we’re going to meet with Elaina’s foster parents.  Both of them are coming!  We’ve heard that it’s really unusual for the foster dad to come to the agency meetings.  Elaina’s foster dad came to all the appointments we had at the agency—three in one week—when we adopted her.  Now that she’s visiting, he asked that we reschedule for later in the day so that he can attend.  I couldn’t be happier.  When we first met Elaina and her foster parents, you could tell that they both really loved her, and the foster dad was as much a part of it as the foster mom.  It’s great to know that he cares enough to want to be included in this visit. 

Elaina’s excited—both to meet her brother and to see her foster parents again.  She seems to be okay with the concept of the foster parents, and she seemed very pleased that they want to meet her and that her foster dad specifically got the meeting rescheduled so he could be there.  In her words, “They took care of me and loved me when I was a baby.”