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Wednesday morning, despite being really tired, we all awoke at about 4:00 AM! Of course, that was 5:00 PM Detroit time, so our bodies were just confused by the time change. We spent a while lying around, making plans, and getting ready, then went down to a very nice breakfast buffet at the hotel cafe. When we returned to our room around 9:00 AM we called Ms. Yang, our social worker at Holt Children's Services [LINK], to find out when we could come and meet Ryan for the first time. We thought that, due to the short notice, it would take a few days to set up the meeting, but to our surprise she told us we should come at 11:00 that morning!
We made it there just on time and were greeted at the door by Ryan and his foster parents, Mr. Kim and Mrs. Choi. We all went upstairs to Ms. Yang's office, and she ushered us in. We sat down and finally got the chance to interact with Ryan for the first time. He was absolutely gorgeous, and just as we had been led to expect, happy and alert. We were immediately captivated by him. Mrs. Choi and Mr. Kim were lovely people and obviously loved Ryan very much. We exchanged greetings and questions via Ms. Yang, who did a great job of translating, and Deborah was kind enough to take notes for us [Image 13]. We found that they had been foster parents for about 11 years, and that Mrs. Choi, who was a full-time mom (her bio kids are young adults) and is now a full-time foster mom, had recently won a Foster Mother of the Year award from Holt. Mr. Kim is a municipal worker for the City of Seoul (apparently a manager of some type, because he has a business card with his photo on it), but as you can see [Image 17, Image 18] he is obviously a very hands-on foster father as well.
We met for about an hour and had a fabulous time holding Ryan and talking with Ms. Yang, Mrs. Choi, and Mr. Kim. When it was time to leave, Mrs. Choi put Ryan's hat on [Image 19] and we went down to the vestibule [Image 20]. When they saw it was raining, Mr. Kim and Mrs. Choi refused to let us call a taxi and instead took us back to our hotel in their own van [Image 21, Image 22]. We bid Ryan and his foster parents adieu in front of our hotel and agreed to meet again on Friday.
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