The beginnings of the adoption journey

We started getting information packets from different adoption agencies. That was another job in itself, trying to determine which agency to use. We had settled on two and set up a meeting with one of them in June 2009. We met with the social worker there and she told us all about how their programs work. At this point, we had considered international adoption but we learned at this meeting that we would be rejected by almost every country because of Tommy's heart condition.

The plan was to begin everything in January 2010. She told us that although they can't give you a specific wait time, that we could be waiting for 2-3 years. Wow, we had no clue. We walked out of there and actually had a peace about everything. We were excited and that spark of hope and excitement that we had when we first started trying was back. Tommy said we should go ahead and get started. It also worked out great because I was out of school for the summer and the plan was to complete all of the paperwork before school started back in August.

Our agency is Beth.any Christian Services and so far we love them. With them, we had to fill out a preliminary application, a formal application, and then the homestudy would begin. We also had to attend 2 orientation meetings. We filled out the preliminary application and then learned that they would have to have letters from Tommy's doctors basically stating that he was capable of parenting with his heart condition. This took longer than expected and I had to track down these letters from a couple of his doctors. Once that was finished we were approved and then we were able to fill out the formal application. Every question you can think of, we answered. They probably know more about us than anyone else :) By this point we were already in August/September.

We went to our first orientation meeting in October. We walked away having learned so much. They had a panel of adoptive parents and a birthmother. It was pretty neat to hear all of the different stories of the adoption triad. One adoptive mother said, you need to treat this waiting time just like you were if you were pregnant, get things together etc. Enjoy it. We had debated back and forth about setting up a nursery especially after going through the miscarriage. But after we heard those stories we felt like we should go ahead and start. That way if we are matched and the expectant mother changes her mind, the nursery will already be there. It won't be like we've set it up for "that" particular baby.

We had 3 meetings with our social worker. One was a together meeting; the next individual interviews; and the last was the home visit. In the beginning I was really worried about these but things went really well. She's really easy to talk to and we basically answered all of the same questions we had filled out on all of the paperwork. We finished all of these meetings in the middle of January. I never knew it would take so long to go through all of that paperwork. Our social worker had 30 days to write up the homestudy and then we would be "officially" approved and waiting. We had everything ready for her on that last meeting and she checked over our profile book, made a few suggestions and that was it. We made the corrections on the profile book, had the copies made and sent them off.

On February 17, 2010 we received the email that everything had been received and we were "officially" waiting! So we are almost at month 4 of waiting. It hasn't been too bad, yet :) I think the infertility struggles and treatment got us used to the waiting game. The one downside is we basically get no information unless an expectant mom wants to meet with us or if one of the social workers has a question for us. We do know that we've been shown once but the expectant mom was early in her pregnancy and hadn't made a decision yet. Hopefully we'll hear something soon. In the meantime we'll just continue to prepare ourselves for the journey ahead.