Destination Paradise

South Korean high schoolers' response to North Korea declaring war on the country where we live: Play an elaborate game of playground tag and help the foreign kid build a sand volcano. 04/31/2013 I'm hoping to squeeze this post in during March in an attempt to build some kind of blogging momentum, but then again we all know that working full-time while raising two kids in a foreign country can kind of present some obstacles to that goal. So today I am planning to talk about the everyday South Korean response to North Korea's increasingly threatening rhetoric this past week. But let's start with some good news, shall we!? Just a few weeks ago, the US Department of State very quietly slipped in a new amendment into one of the policy manuals used by immigration officers. It just came to our attention last weekend. Basically, it is providing an exception for the lifetime ban that currently has us exiled from the US, in cases where the intending immigrant was a mino...

OK, so it's officially February and I've been working on the following post for over a month now. But I have a pretty good reason for the delay, I think! 2012 was a remarkable year for our family. It's the first calendar year we've spent completely living in Korea, and the first we've spent living together as a family. While 2011 brought the newness and adjustment of being a complete family for the first time, 2012 was a chance to settle in and make this "normal". And although we started 2012 as a family of three, we finished it as a family of four. Welcome to the world, baby Carolina Violetta. Failed passport photo #27. Turns out this is harder to do with a newborn than a 3 month-old.  The day of her birth was a truly remarkable one in every way and totally warrants its own blog post which I'll hopefully get to soon...er...sometime this year.  Suffice it to say it was a major adventure and we're glad it all worked out as well as...