John Parker - We Love You!

I've been getting SO many emails about John Parker, so I figured it was time to update my blog.

First -- how did we come up with the name John Parker? John's Korean name is Chan (pronounced Chon/John) and his last name is Park, hence the Parker. Chan means bright. The second part of his first name is Hyuk (meaning great), which I've heard pronounced 3 different ways so far, none of which I'm able to pronounce (one was Hyuck, one was Huck and the other was Jyook.) I don't think there are enough letters in our alphabet for that name to be Romanized properly, so I stuck with the Chan/John instead. It was important for us to have him hold on to his Korean heritage and we liked the idea of having his name sound the same as it did in Korea, but spelled easily enough for his American peers to pronounce. We also wanted to keep the letter "J" for Joseph. Another weird contributing factor in our decision to name him John Parker is Joe's obsession with the notion that the middle intial P sounds awesome with every name. When we were discussing names before we received our referral, Joe would always say, try the letter P between any first and last name and it sounds good. It became a household joke and I started calling him "JPC" -- never realizing we'd actually have one in our home. I had been obsessing SO much over baby names before this referral, and Joe kept saying, "when we get the referral, it will just come to us." That killed me, but he was SO right!

John was born in a hospital in Incheon, South Korea on July 5, 2006 at 1:09pm. He is currently living with his foster family. The foster family consists of four people, the foster mom, who is depicted in the montage below, her husband, and her two sons who are in their late twenties. The foster mom has been caring for SWS's foster children since 1999. She appears to be a very kind woman.

Right now, John is drinking a full bottle every two to two and a half hours. He is not on a set sleeping schedule and fights to fall asleep. He is startled at loud sounds, which means he will have a lot of adjusting to do in our home. Heehee. He makes eye contact, smiles, babbles, stares at moving objects and watches TV for a little while. He's rather sensitive and enjoys being around people. That's about all I know right now. Oh, and he's a chunky monkey incase you haven't figured that out! He was born at 6 lbs and at his 2 month visit, he had almost doubled his weight! The foster moms in Korea like to plump the babies up before they send them to their forever families as a sign that they took good care of them! Love the cheeks!

Thanks for all of your support thus far. We're keeping our fingers and toes crossed that John will be home for Christmas! We were quoted a timeframe of 10-12 weeks from formal acceptance, which was on 9/27.