Busy day on the Adoption front...

Today we received a new well baby check up report, more information on Max's current foster family and word that the National Visa Center sent our approval to the US Embassy in Seoul, South Korea.  I will break it all down for you.

Well Baby Check: 12-27-2010

Max is walking one step independently, he has 8 teeth (3 new ones since last month!) and grew just a little... He is now 27.5 inches tall and weighs 17 pounds 10 oz.

Foster Family Info:

I won't share too much, but we do know that his current foster family in Seoul he has a Foster mom and dad, as well as 2 foster sisters and a foster brother in their teens and early 20's.  Max is their first foster child that they have had.  I am sure they all love him very much.

National Visa Center:

The United States side of the paperwork is completely done, the US Embassy in Korea has a few things to do, but for the most part the US is done.  The US gave us their stamp of approval so to speak and the last major thing is the Emigration Permit(EP)...that is where this whole journey gets really interesting...

Where does that leave us? You may want to skip to "the bottom line"

Well...this is where the possible delay comes in.  I will try to explain it the best I can.  The EP is what we need for Max to get his passport and the Korean governments approval for him to leave the country permanently and get his one way Visa/Passport to come to the US.  This is the last big piece of the puzzle...and the trickiest.

Each calendar year the Korean Government gives each of the agencies a certain number of EP's for the year.  This is their way of trying to limit the number of children that are adopted internationally.  However this has no bearing on how many children are relinquished to each agency in any given year...so basically there are more babies that EP's available.   Because of this, our agency ran out of EP's for 2010 for families matched with a baby in July 2010...We were matched with Max on 10-4-10...so there are many families ahead of us that have been waiting longer.  However, it now 2011! They got a new stock of EP's for the year and they are again starting to process them.  We know we are not in the first group to be submitted...the first group should be submitted this week, it is unclear at this time how many groups will be submitted in the next few weeks, we could be in the second group...or the twelfth group...we won't know until we are notified.  However, I may be able to figure out when we are getting close. 

The Bottom Line:

Once we are in fact submitted for EP, we should be notified, processing takes 2-6 weeks, and typically your travel call would be within the next 3-5 weeks after that.  So once we know we are submitted for EP we will travel 5 to 11 weeks later.  We remain optimistic that we will travel some time in April, maybe a little sooner...maybe a little later.  But once we know we have our EP...I will be letting everyone know.  So if you see a post about EP...it means we are getting much much closer!