John's been in South Korea for over three weeks now.

Natalie and I are still here, trying to adjust. Plans are being made as far as getting us over to South Korea as well but without tons of money, it's slow going. One of the things I have to do yet is fill out the applications for the visas and send those along with passport photos of both me and Natalie as well as our passports. Before I can even do this though, I need to make copies of the birth certificate AND marriage license both and send those to the school John is at so that those can be sent to the immigration office over there. Then, we're supposed to get our numbers and those go on the visa applications and all of this stuff has to be sent to the Korean Consulate in Chicago. Then those are looked over and we should then get our visas and after that, plans will be made as far as getting the plane tickets. John is working with the travel agent the school worked with when getting him over there and hopefully, we won't have to wait until after January 1st to get there but it's possible. I'm trying to figure everything out and make plans and go through things because I want to be down to having ONLY enough stuff to go into our check in bag and carry on bag and everything else will either be given away, sold, or put in storage. I'm also hoping that I'll be able to pick up a few things we'll need before leaving. Natalie will need new socks and possibly even some new clothes as she has grown over an inch since October 22nd. She will probably also need some new underwear. I need new underwear and new socks myself and maybe another pair or two of pants as those are hard to locate in my size over there.

It hasn't been easy. We both miss John here very much and living with family tends to invite comments and criticisms and they've never really liked John that much anyway. Then there's the religious differences and the fact that this is the time of year we normally do not celebrate that everyone else does! So that makes things a little more difficult. We're also WAAAAAY out in the boonies, the nearest town (and I say this almost tongue-in-cheek as there isn't even a grocery store there but there is a post office) is about 10 miles away. The nearest REAL town is about 15 miles away. Fortunately, there's a Wal-Mart there and if I need most of anything, I can get it there. My hometown is 35 miles away. Natalie has been having to adjust to not being able to go to the park when she wants to or really even outside that much. We're RIGHT by a highway and she's at the non-listening stage of her development right now which has me very concerned. There are also electric fences around here and would prefer she didn't learn to avoid them the way I did, by touching one. Yeouch!

So I'm trying to take each super long day as it comes and hoping that everything will get set up soon so that we can get over there and finally be together and then that will begin the next stage, actually being in Korea. I'm sure there will be interesting pictures coming once I'm over there as there will be all kinds of things to explore. We'll be near a subway (something I have never been on) and I'm sure we'll be taking all kinds of modes of travel while we are there since we will NOT be driving at all. In the meantime, I do have a picture of John and Natalie before he flew out from O'Hare last month:

Don't they look cute together? There's a picture of me somewhere too but eh, I never do like my pictures. lol