Destination Paradise

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...

It's November! Chilly weather has officially set in, but it's still lovely. Our family has been quite busy. There have been Halloween festivities (more than I think we've ever done in any country!). Piles of candy in the apartment right now. Lucas had a major Halloween event at school, my school had Halloween festivities that consumed all my energy on the 31st, and yesterday we participated in a Halloween party for expat families in our area which was a ton of fun. Performing with his classmates Lucas and Daddy with the massive bag of candy loot My costume at school Lucas is Iron Man War Machine! Carlos worked to make it look extra cool Two little superheroes decorating mandarin oranges with Jack-o-Lantern faces Demolishing the remains of the Halloween piñata Baby - We're at 34 weeks. Time is flying. Still no name picked out, but we're getting closer to figuring something out. I'm very grateful that this has been a healthy pregnan...

Here we are in fall! The bridge from August to September is filled with rain. I'm not sure if the term "monsoon season" is apt in Korea, but it rains a LOT in August. And then the typhoons start. This year we had predictions of a really powerful one at the end of August. For days, there were warnings of the incoming Typhoon Bolaven , and we were instructed to take all sorts of precautionary measures, like prepping the windows with masking tape, turning off the gas, stocking up on water reserves, etc. It was supposed to be the biggest typhoon in maybe a decade. The day of the typhoon, classes were cancelled for my students and Lucas' school closed. However, at many public schools like mine, the teachers were still expected to come in. So we did, and enjoyed a day of quiet to get tasks done in the building. We were able to leave before the winds really picked up, and I spent a cozy afternoon hunkered down in the apartment with Lucas and Carlos, making baked goods. Carlo...

So here goes Part II in my rapid-fire blogging spurt to catch up to the present... Summer 2012 kicked off with Carlos taking part in his country's political process for the first time, sending in his absentee ballot to vote for Mexico's next president. Although there was widespread discontent and distrust in Mexico over the general management and final result of the election, at least we know Carlos did his part. From Summer 2012 in Korea Carlos and Lucas got to spend Father's Day together for the first time, I believe. :) From Summer 2012 in Korea Baby G #2 started growing and making her presence known From Summer 2012 in Korea Although it took another ultrasound to really confirm her gender, this one was pretty cool, if you're into ultrasounds: In a later post, I'll write about the experience of being pregnant and getting medical care in Korea, as I have plenty of things to say on the subject (mostly positive!).  In early August, I final...

I kind of dropped out of the blogging game for awhile. Lots of things have happened since my last post, virtually all of them good. But I think most importantly, I finally started to feel like life was usual. Nothing extraordinary to blog about, and that is a good sign. But I was reminded that there are lots of people thinking of and praying for us on a regular basis, people who like to check the blog, people who have reminded me that 6 months is probably a bit long to go without posting. So I'm going to try to update slowly this week, one season at a time, starting with Spring! Let's see what happened in Spring...(I had to consult Facebook Timeline to remember some of this. See! It's not such a bad concept, people!) Well, first of all, Lucas settled in at school. You can click these images to see more of that detailed in photos if you want: From Lucas at School The Avengers came out in theaters! It was released more than a week ahead of the US, which means Lucas ...

I'm finally breaking the several-month silence on blogging. It's been Winter Break in the Korean education world, which is the longest break of the academic year, but for some reason my general productivity during break shot pretty low. I've got a whole bunch of half-written blog posts, most just waiting for the insertion of a few photos and some more-developed ideas. So for this post, I'm not getting ambitious. I'm keeping it simple: This weekend we're celebrating 6 months in Korea. Last fall, one of Carlos' soccer teammates, a chef from Spain who has lived in Korea for a few years, told us that if we could make it 6 months here, we'd be able to settle down and make it home for a few years as well. So far, it seems he was right. We may be foreigners, and our Korean still suffers pretty badly, but I can say pretty confidently that we're now settled. We know where to buy what, we know how to accomplish all our basic activities without needing assi...

While being away from the rest of the family and the comforting traditions on Thanksgiving can be so depressing, there are some benefits. One big one is that we can be totally flexible with how we celebrate and what traditions we carry on/invent. So, our original Thanksgiving Day plan was to make our first trip to Costco for some essentials, and then cook dinner and have our own little Thanksgiving here in Korea. But the moment we set foot in Costco, we knew it was going to be no small trip. We ended up spending hours in there, and since Lucas was doing fine relaxing in the cart with an iPad, we decided to just skip the plans for dinner and instead do our Thanksgiving Dinner on Friday. Thus, our Thanksgiving meal was actually McDonald's, another rare delicacy from home.  This means we were able to stock up on so many awesome and exciting things: cheese, sausage, AVOCADOES!, oatmeal, plus our Thanksgiving dessert. Costco is fun because all of the expats wander the store with...

Here is about 3 months' worth of video footage and possibly some previously unseen photos related to our new life in Korea. I finally strung them all together thanks to the wonders of iMovie. It's a bit on the long side, but hopefully it will give you a bit more of a taste of our life here. Everything here was shot either on an iPod, an iPad, or MacBook iSight camera (and a few random LG dumbphone camera shots, too).  So it’s pretty unprofessional, but I think it tells the story pretty decently. :) Glad we’ve finally reached this stop on our journey.

Lucas, excited about some live fish in front of a restaurant. No need to visit an aquarium when you live in Korea.  Raising a preschooler in Korea with two foreign parents. Not a lot about this online. There are tons of blogs and online resources out there about living in Korea as a foreigner. There are quite a few on raising kids in Korea, too, but they seem to relate to families where at least one parent is Korean. Obviously there are families here in Korea where both parents are foreigners (we've spotted a couple), but they just don't seem to be writing on blogs or anything. Maybe because parenting a foreign child in Korea means you JUST DON'T HAVE TIME!!! So, until someone points us to some resources, here is our in-progress guide. Things You Should Know About Raising a Young Child in Korea (when neither parent is Korean) PART 1 - CHALLENGES Transportation Let's begin with the fact that, unless you've been granted immigrant or some very long-term status...

(A.K.A. the post where I will make heavy use of the past perfect tense) It's been a month already! Sadly, we still don't have internet at home, so this has limited my online posting, but soon (hopefully this week) that will be set up. Here are some of the things that have happened in our first month in Korea: We think we found a church. It was recommended by multiple friends. Not too far from home, but still takes about an hour to get there via subway. Hoping that we'll settle in and get connected there. By the way, churches are truly everywhere here. They almost all have a lit neon cross on top, so at night, when we look out our back window, we see lots of these dotting the streets between our apartment and the main boulevard. flickr photo courtesy of taylorsloan Carlos found a soccer team. He looked online, found a great team, and has been playing with them for a few weeks. It's an expat league, so most of the players are from the US, the UK, Spain, and Latin ...