Our Adoption Journey - part 2

So after making the decision to adopt, we had to decide where to adopt from.  I was initially very drawn to Ethiopia.  But the process to bring a child home from Ethiopia now involves 2 trips into the country each lasting a week or more.  The King did not like the idea of me traveling alone to Ethiopia (which I would have had to do the second trip because of his limited vacation time).  While I was trying to convince him that it would be ok, Egypt erupted politically.  then other countries followed suit. Ethiopia has a very chancy political environment anyway so this was enough to convince us both to stay within the US.

After that decision was made I started researching different agencies.  We were drawn to a small IL agency but they do very few placements each year.  I made contact with them and asked a few questions and we decided to use them as our homestudy agency.  Our social worker (who was wonderful), came to our house 4 times to inspect the house, and interview us and the kids.  Although it was intimidating the think about, Maria, the social worker, really put us at ease and made it easier to manage.  She also helped us with all the paperwork and hoops we had to jump through...including physicals, fingerprinting, financial info, etc.  The homestudy was officially finished in the end of June.  It took about 8 weeks.

While we were completing our homestudy we were also working with our placement agency.  We chose them at the same time we chose our homestudy agency.  We chose American Adoptions because they do many placements per year and their time frames were good.  I also really liked how friendly and helpful they were on the phone when I called.  While doing our homestudy, I was also writing essays and taking photos to submit to American Adoptions for our profile.  It was ready to submit within a week after finishing our homestudy.  We are now actively waiting for a birth mother to chose us.  According to American Adoptions policies birthmothers should be seeing our profile weekly or so.  We will not hear from them until a birthmother has shown interest in us being her baby's family.  In the meantime, we are receiving equipment to do a video profile which is very exciting to me.

We have also planned a fundraiser and are planning to hit a craft show.  I'll share more about both of those things next week.