Are you done yet, and how is it going? Port forwarding can be done automatically if your router supports uPnP. It might take many hours to download the whole blockchain, but once this is done, it's done. You will be running a full node.
Don't use uPnP you will mostly only get 8 connections if you want to be a full node, make sure the port is forward so you can allow incoming connections.
UPnP allows your client to configure the router to open port 8333, so you can have more than eight connections. Of course, this only works if your router is uPnP-ready.