Meeting My Little Girl

One of the great pleasures of adopting a child who is not a newborn (in our case, 18 months old) is that they come with a personality. Our daughter, Adaleigh Ye-eun (Yay-aen), was shy at first but warmed up to us pretty quickly. This is pretty remarkable since we're the only Anglo people she has ever seen in her life. Although, she has been looking at pictures of us for some time and calling us "um-ma" (mother) and "ap-pa" (father). She seemed to make the connection between our pictures and our actual faces immediately. [On a side note, the foster mother and adoption agent both commented that April and I are better looking than they expected from our photos. I have no idea how to interpret that, but I'll take it as a compliment because it makes me feel better that way. The alternative is that they were expecting hideous creatures from the American lagoon.]

Adaleigh Ye-eun Mooney

Back to Adaleigh. After her initial shyness, she became very expressive. She laughs a lot, covers her mouth and gasps as if shocked, dances on command, and is very formal. When you say "kamsamnida" (thank you), she nods in affirmation. When we said "annyonghaseyo" (good bye) she gave us a slow formal bow. She seems to be strong-willed and sassy, and, given that our son Gavin is a man's man in the making, Addie's girliness will bring welcome balance to the Mooney household.
While adoptive parents often crave to have those sweet days of a newborn, there is a certain romantic adventure to starting with a child with a largely formed personality. She is a little person that we get to know in coming days and weeks. Today (Tuesday) we spent an hour with her in her foster home, but we had to leave her. On Wednesday, we'll be tourists again, on our own in this giant city. We'll keep ourselves busy and try to enjoy ourselves until we take custody of Addie on Thursday. Then, the real adventure begins--returning to America.

More Pictures:

Being a very patriotic Korean, she LOVED her foster mom's Samsung phone.

Eating a banana...on a stick.

Not being a child easily contained, she's trying to escape and play with her phone.

proud mom

Our First Day in Seoul (as tourist)

Today was our first full day in Seoul, South Korea. We meet our daughter tomorrow, but today we were Tourists with a capital "T".  Below are some pics from the trip up to this point.

 If you can believe it, we felt even worse than we look (above). After days of little sleep and preparation for our trip, we had to drive 11 hours through the night to Chicago. Then, we boarded a flight to Korea, which took 14 hours. I'm pretty sure I would have snapped into irreversible madness at hour 15.

On our first full day in Seoul, we visited the COEX mall, which had its own aquarium. This aquarium had these cute little guys. A long night's sleep and these guys made me feel better. My presence seemed to do nothing for them however.

Again, at the aquarium, this is one of those spot-the-tourist attractions. I have a profoundly irrational fear of sharks, so I took this photo ironically, because "ironic" is the new sexy.

OK, this is just terrifying. I couldn't get near it (due to the barriers and my own mental instability at the moment), but the span of the mouth is approximately 6 feet. This means it could eat me while standing. (Who knew sharks could stand?)

"Hey boy, you lookin' at me?"

I hate Korean food. It's OK for me to say it--I'm not here as a missionary. But, it would be a shame to travel all the way to Seoul and not eat genuine Korean food. We had table-fired brisket and pork loin served with approximately one dozen small bowls of of bitter nastiness. I'm pretty sure the 7 bowls of God's wrath in the book of Revelation are full of Korean food. April loves it though.

This is the restaurant where we ate. If you'll notice, the sign above reads "Au Canada" and there are 6 maple leaf flags. Isn't Canada always that oddly out of place thing to the north? Don't worry. We didn't see any Canadians.

This is the view from the top of our hotel, overlooking an enormous Catholic church in the Gangnam District of Seoul. It was nearly dark, so I set the camera to slow exposure. Seoul is a metro area of approximately 20 million people. 

In reality, the time we spend as tourists is just about occupying our minds, which long to both meet our daughter, Adaleigh, and return to our son, Gavin. Like Adaleigh, Gavin is adopted from South Korea, and we see his face in every Korean child. The biggest moment we look forward to is stepping into our own home in Arkansas and introducing our children to one another, making our family whole (for now anyway).

I'll post pics tomorrow of our first meeting of Adaleigh. You can also follow April's blog updates here.

Blessings,


Charlie