Happy Birthday, JJ!

Wow, how time flies when it comes to kids growing up. This past Friday my son, JJ, turned the big "5". It didn't seem that long ago that my wife and I were in Seoul, Korea meeting him for the first time. He was a whopper of a baby - 25 pounds at only 9 months of age. YIKES!!! Not only that, he had a full and wild head of hair, to go along with 8 teeth. Well, much hasn't changed in the past 4+ years. He's still a brute, standing nearly 4 feet tall and weighing in at 60 pounds, and I love every inch and ounce of him.

For those who don't know the story about how he came into our lives, here's the skinny. About 7 years ago, my wife and I decided that we had been "kids" long enough (35 and 30 years old) and it was time to finally start a family. Well, as luck would have it, we managed to get pregnant after trying for a while. Hooray!! But wait, not so quick. About 2 months into the pregnancy, things went wrong. As it turned out, the pregnancy was ectopic, meaning that the egg had gotten stuck in my wife's fallopian tube. The tube ruptured and my wife had to have emergency surgery. After she recovered, we continued to try, without success. Being adopted from South Korea herself, adoption was always something we had considered. So, we went for it and after over a year of paperwork and impatient waiting, we finally got the call to go to Seoul and pick him up. It was the most amazing experience of our life, especially for my wife, who hadn't been back to Korea since she was adopted at 9 months old. For her, it was the first time that she felt like she blended in with everyone and was just "one of the crowd". She even got to visit the orphanage she was raised at and received a photo of herself neither she nor any of her family had ever seen.

So, that's the story in a nutshell. Since then, my wife has had another ectopic pregnancy with the same end result. Bummer...... But, we couldn't be happier with our little family - 2 cats, 1 dog, and a truly amazing boy. Happy birthday, my little man. Daddy loves you more than anything!