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...

a symbol of the vows we took on May 12, 2007 In the days leading up to Valentine's Day, there tend to be lots of events and lively public discussion about marriage. For example, today is National Marriage Day, and there is a growing international movement to make the week surrounding February 14  International Marriage Week , a week to celebrate marriage and promote its health and survival. In fact, last year several Congressmen in the House of Representatives spent 45 minutes reinforcing the benefits of marriage and the need for a National Marriage week. During that time, they said things like the following: "...It should always be our goal to keep that family unit together, and to hold that bedrock of our society together...And this is something that we can build on that will benefit our society." ~Rep. Gregg Harper and this "National leaders should be encouraging stable family formation, not redefining marriage. I call upon Congress to recognize the i...

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...

Then An immigrant family arrives to the US at Ellis Island Now A hopeful immigrant holds some of the paperwork needed for his spouse visa OK, recently we've decided that part of the reason this blog exists is to bring light to some of the facts, myths, and injustices in the world of US immigration because our lives have been permanently affected by them. So first, we've got to clarify what it takes to immigrate to the US. In the olden days, people could arrive to the US on a ship, full of hopes and willingness to work hard, sign their name to a register, get a medical check-up, and start a life full of promise in the US. It is no longer even remotely this simple. According to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services , there are four ways a person can immigrate to the US: Be one of the rare winners of the US State Department's Diversity Lottery . This only applies to people from certain countries (most of the world's largest ones are excluded)...