First Meeting

Wow. It's been a full day, and it's only 2pm! We got to sleep around 9:30 last night. We woke up at 3:30, and I was able to doze a while. Then I woke up at 5:30 and couldn't go back to sleep; so we got up at 6. As excited as I've been all week, I was surprisingly calm this morning. After a little breakfast at Dunkin' Donuts we headed over to the agency to meet Liv! We got there at 9:45 and received Liv's passport and immigration documents as well as a little instruction on what to do. Then at 10 we joined 2 other couples to meet Dr. Kim Sr. who is the founder of the Eastern (the agency/orphanage) and is also 93 and still working. He was a neat Christian man to meet. Eastern is much larger than I knew - they have many different facilities that meet a variety of social service needs. He speaks Korean, Japanese, and Chinese fluently and apologized for his English. I thought he did just fine,and for goodness sake - you can speak 3 other languages besides! We then met the other Dr. Kim who is the president of Eastern. She was a very kind woman who gave us some of the history of Korea as well as Eastern. Then at 11 we got to meet Liv!

I had been calm all morning, but right before we walked into to see the baby I just lost it and needed a minute to regain my composure. I didn't want to scare this little one! One thing that I'd been praying in the months leading up to this was that somehow the Lord would make us familiar to Liv, that we wouldn't seem like random strangers to her. And so we went into this little room and there she was! We took off our shoes and sat on the floor with her, and I had sat down for just a second and she crawled right over to me up into my lap! It was amazing. And she looked at me for a couple seconds and I looked back at her. Then she crawled off and moved toward Aaron. The Lord really had answered that prayer. She was definitely anchored to her foster mother but was not at all scared of Aaron or I and crawled between the 3 of us.

It was just amazing to finally meet her and touch her. She's a little peanut, not very big. She crawls really well and pulls herself up. Her foster mother was wonderful. You could tell that she loves Liv and takes really good care of her. She was very encouraging of Liv to move her toward us and volunteered so much information and was very willing to answer questions. She said that Liv is smart and curious and active. She doesn't like to be covered up when she sleeps, and she moves around a lot when she sleeps. The foster mother has nicknamed her Princess - appropriate :). It just seems like she's doing really well!

So I'm going to post this and then put up some pictures. I don't want to lose all I've written. We'll continue to keep you updated. With much love, the Joneses :)