A Little History

Welcome to our blog. Our friends Laura and Chip Bird have a blog going for their adoption experience with their son Owen and we thought this might be an easy way to keep everyone up to date.

Our story with Ian began on August 3rd. That is the day we got the call from our social worker, Anne Johnson, telling us we had a referral. I drove over to Anne's office during lunch and she gave me the information. I resisted looking at the pictures until I could get home to show Dana. We rushed the paperwork to our doctor, Dr. Yu. He looked it over and said everything looked fine.

We hadn't yet settled on a name so we did not tell anyone yet. On Saturday morning, August 4, we told our parents about Ian Hank Marthaler. We settled on Ian and Hank comes from his Korean name Hankyung. Ben has Parker for a middle name as his Korean name was Park, Doo Jin. Cami kept her Korean first name as her middle name - SungHwa. After settling on a name, we called our parents with the news. Then we met Dana's brother Mike, his wife Alison, and their kids Austin and Kylie, who were visiting from Southern California, for breakfast and told them the exciting news.

Because of Korea's new adoption rules, we couldn't officially send our acceptance in until August 19th. I ran (literally) the package to FedEx and then we started waiting.

The next step was getting Ian's legal documents from Korea. In mid-September, they were sent to our international agency, AIAA, who then forwarded them to our social worker Anne Johnson. She then sent them to Karen Slaney at the State of Wisconsin. Ms. Slaney approved the paperwork and sent it to the immigration (USCIS) office in Milwaukee on September 28. Then we waited for the big brown envelope from USCIS. It finally came on October 26. The letter, dated October 24, said Ian's visa was approved and it was being sent to the consulate in Seoul.

And that's where we are today. Now we wait for the call to travel. It could be anywhere from 2 - 6 weeks. His Korean passport needs to be issues and then we should get a call.