Christmas Came Early

Unlike the processes in many other foreign countries that allow children to be adopted into U.S. families, nothing legal happened while we were in Korea.  I mean we didn’t do anything illegal.  I just mean we didn’t appear before a judge, there was no courtroom, and no final adoption.  We merely gained custody.  Maybe the correct term in guardianship…not really sure.  Actually our agency has legal whatever which they so graciously sign over to us until we finalize.  So what does that mean?

That means that we had to do even more paperwork when we returned, have x-number of post-placement visits by our social worker, and wait 6 months until Ty could be an official Corkum.  I won’t even go into the confusion that is having a son with a Korean name that sounds kinda like his new name who is legally his Korean name but referred to by his “American” name.  Are you still with me?

There are a lot of financial reasons (think tax credit) why we were really hoping to finalize before December 31st.  Having a homecoming in late April makes this not a guarantee but we were motivated to do our best.

Long story short, we had resigned ourselves to a January finalization since we hadn’t heard much good news since filing, in person, in early Novemer, and the adoption judge only works on Wednesdays.  But, lo and behold, we had  letter from our local courthouse in our mailbox today which announced a court date of Wednesday, December 16 @9:30AM!  Ty will be officially and irrevocably ours the day after he turns 3.

Merry Christmas…a little early.