Adoption: the Kurz Family

An Adoption Update from the Kurz Family

Last November, we learned that just the next month we would be traveling to meet Silas. We traveled to Seoul to meet Silas in December and then went back in January to bring him home. The first trip involved some adoption meetings and sightseeing while our second trip was focused on taking care of Silas in the hotel plus a few more adoption related meetings and paperwork. It was both wonderful to finally be able to call him our son, but challenging to communicate and get settled in with each other. In our first few months back home one of our biggest challenges was related to sleep, both with naps and at bedtime. We gradually progressed from sleeping on the floor in the boys' room to sleeping in the bedroom next to them to having everyone sleeping in the right room in their own bed. We have also been challenged by communicating with Silas and we are still in the language learning process. We were told that his language was delayed and that he said a handful of Korean words. Since we were not used to his toddler language and he could not understand English, in the early months we were introducing a lot of sign language to help diminish frustration about not being able to understand each other. As Silas began to articulate words better and understand what he heard we used less sign language. Together we have been learning to communicate and now we are close to being able to have small, toddler sized English conversations with little sign language. 

Silas keeps us busy. We have learned he is not very cautious, but we are helping him learn to be more careful. We have been taking him to therapy appointments weekly which has helped him make so much progress in reaching various milestones. This school year he started preschool a few days a week. He has enjoyed his class since the first day and it is a joy to see him succeeding in a class of kids his age.

Overall, adopting Silas has been a great blessing. We are all still getting used to having a bigger family and there are always challenges, but we have loved having Silas with us. Tobiah enjoys being a big brother and they love playing together, even if they do annoy each other at times. Silas is now comfortable enough with us and communicating well enough that we are starting to have to deal with normal toddler rebelliousness and tantrums, but even that shows just how much progress we are making.