One More Step Closer to Carter

Hello Everyone. It has been a busy, busy month; Why is it that so much always happens during the shortest month of the year? As I mentioned in my previous post; at the end of January I had a second hip surgery, so far everything has progressed very well. As the calendar changed to February we experienced back-to-back snow storms resulting in 50 inches of snow!! I felt really bad for Paige that I was not able to help her shovel all of that snow but we are very fortunate to have really great neighbors who helped clear it all away.

Over the Valentine's/President's Day weekend we went to Connecticut for Paige's Baby Shower. It was a crazy quick trip; we drove up on Friday afternoon and came back on Sunday. Paige's Mom surprised her with her Aunt Leslie from Florida and she had a great time visiting with her close friends and our families. Everyone was quite generous; our car was packed to the "hilt"; we had to leave a bunch of stuff at her parent's because it wouldn't all fit in our car. The plan was for Bainie to come to the Virginia Shower this weekend and she could bring the rest of the gifts to us ; now the Northeast is getting clobbered by a snow storm so she is not going to make it.

I have spent the past two weeks traveling on business; last week was a planning meeting in Scottsdale with our largest supplier on 2010 initiatives; the weather was amazing, sunny and 80 everyday. Thank goodness we had some downtime by the pool. While I was out there I was able to go check-in on my grandmother who is in a nursing home in Glendale. She has suffered from Alzheimer's for many years and it has been 3 years since I saw her last. I expected that she would not know me; I was surprised at how talkative she was and how happy she appeared to be. I truly expected her to to be non-responsive so to see her happy and talkative allowed me to leave her feeling better than I did when I walked in to see her.

This week was pretty much the opposite to the previous week; meetings in Seattle, not much sun there...... but the end of this trip has taken us one more step closer to Carter.

Today we received in the mail our approval letter for our I-600 from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. For those of you who have not gone thru this process; the I-600 gives us the approval to bring in a foreign orphan as an immediate family member. This is an major step closer to bring Carter home! What this means is we will more-than-likely receive our travel call in the next 2 weeks!! So now it looks like we are in the "home stretch".

On another note; the furniture is in and it will be delivered next week. Carter's room is ready and just waiting for that furniture so we can put the finishing touches on it and have it ready for his arrival home. - John

So here we are almost 2 months into the wait for our precious baby boy to come home and it is absolute torture. The holiday’s were great to keep our minds off of the waiting. Christmas was wonderful, it was just John and I in the morning, our last Christmas without our son, then our friend Jenny and her 2 children, Ryan and Ally came over later for dinner. It was a nice relaxing day. John then was very busy with the Nordstrom Half Yearly Sale and I cleaned house getting ready for his parents and our nephews. We had a great visit with them and got to enjoy some sight seeing with them. John has already mentioned this in a previous post.

We did get busy with starting a registry, something I have been dying to do for years now. It was so much fun putting the list of items together for our new little guy. From bedding to blankets, I think we got it covered. We ordered furniture and hope that it comes in before he arrives.;if not we have a pack and play he can sleep in until it does arrive. But he might end up sleeping with us for a little while. It will all really depend on his sleeping situation now. We have read many times that in the Korean culture the babies often sleep in bed with the parents. If this is the case it will be just fine, I wont want to let him far out of my sight anyway. We cleaned out one of the spare rooms the weekend before John’s surgery (more on that later) and the bedding swatches seem to match great so we don’t even have to paint if we don’t want to. Though we are thinking about painting one wall an accent color.

I have 2 showers planned by friends and family, one in CT and one here in VA. I’m very excited to get together with everyone to celebrate the newest addition to the Wild/Ross family.

We have finally decided on a name too, Carter Baine. Carter because we like it and Baine because it was my Papa’s name and my mother’s name is Bainie. It means a lot for us to be able to keep it going in the family.

So John had another surgery last week, they had to take the screws out and replace them with a different device. All went well and now he is home resting. We decided its best to have the surgery before Carter comes home as it would be too difficult to care for 2 guys at one time. Carter needs and will be the center of attention from the moment we get him.

We did find out this week that the Social Services in the State of VA finally has our paperwork. Since we are pre-approved already to have a child placed in our home hopefully all they will have to do is look at our application and put a stamp of approval on it and send it over to CIS. Once CIS has VA’s approval it can take as little as 5-6 business days for them to give us the approval as well. Once we receive the CIS approval they will wire the information to the National Visa center where our sons name will get logged in and back out of the system. When that happens the approval gets sent over to the Embassy in Seoul and our son will go have his Visa interview. I’m not quite sure what they are going to ask him, but hopefully he will babble that his is ready to come to his forever home with us. Once all is stamped approved and Carter is interviewed we will then get the travel call. From what I have read lately the travel call comes approximately 2 weeks after we receive the CIS approval. So please pray that the State of VA and CIS approve our paperwork quickly and it doesn’t sit on someone’s desk for too long collecting dust.

And so we continue to wait, but it will all be worth it in the end. I guess you could consider this my ‘labor’ and I hear once you have your baby in your arms you forget about how much pain you were in while waiting for them to arrive.

I can’t wait to hold him in my arms! - Paige