Introduction

Family planning has always been very important to us, we just didn’t realize how much of it we were going to get to do! Here’s a brief summary of our adoption path so far:

Michael and I have been trying to conceive since July 1, 2005. We spent a year attempting naturally, and then a year and a half with increasingly invasive fertility treatments. From the very beginning, even before we knew we would have problems conceiving, we strongly considered adoption as a viable option for our family. At the end of 2007, we decided to call off the fertility treatments and start working on adopting. Immediately the stress, pain, and disappointment associated to unsuccessfully conceiving began to melt away - adoption was the right choice for us.

In December of 2007, we signed up with an agency who specialized in Chinese adoptions. There is a lot of documents, 64 in all, that a family has to gather for an international adoption. While we got started on it right away, it still took us 10 months to get everything together and ready to send off to China. Each document had to be notarized, and then the notaries had to be certified by the Secretary of State for each state that they came from (for instance, Michael’s boss had his employment letter notarized in Colorado, so therefore we needed to send that letter to the Colorado SOS), and then you send the entire package to the Chinese embassy that covers your specific state to be authenticated. The document that takes the longest time and is the most difficult is the I-800 immigration form. A copy of your home-study and a large sum of money accompanies the I-800 form when submitted to Homeland Security. And then families just need to wait until they receive a notice for an appointment to be fingerprinted by the FBI. I think Michael and I waited about a month before receiving this appointment notice. We were told to carefully watch what we do with our hands two weeks prior to our fingerprining appointment because the slightest blemish could disqualify us and we would have to start all over. Our agency recommended that we don’t do any manual labor and out lots of lotion on and wear gloves to sleep in at night to plump-up our fingertips. Turns out, we were in Scandanavia the two weeks prior to our appointment, so we threw caution to the wind and it ended up being fine. About 2 months after our fingerprinting, we received our final approval on our I-800 application and were ready to move forward. However, we chose to hold off for a bit and here’s why…

Since the time that we signed up with the agency for the Chinese adoption, our wait period was pushed backfrom 18 months to 4 years. When I heard that it was going to take 4 years, I called our agency and spoke with our case representative. I asked her if they were expecting the wait period to get any longer, and she reluctantly - and after much prodding - told me that they are expecting it to get a little longer and then they expect it to get much better after that (because fewer and fewer families will sign up for Chinese adoptions).

We had already become concerned about the trend of our wait period getting longer and longer and Michael and I had heard that many families have back-up adoption plans. About 6 months ago, I started looking into domestic adoption and state laws, but Michael wasn’t mentally there yet, so I sort of dropped it. Then, at a conference, Michael ran into a colleague and they started talking about adoption. As it turns out, his colleague has adopted two children from a Texas domestic adoption agency and only had great things to say about the agency and the adoption process. Michael came home from that trip excited to tell me about their conversation and seemed ready to start to consider a back-up plan. Michael’s colleague and his wife invited us over one night to talk about their adoption experience. We spent several hours with them, met their beautiful children, and left there with the decision to look into the agency. I spent the next few days researching the agency, domestic adoptions and Texas state laws around adoption. Then we set up an appointment with the agency and ended up spending about 4 hours talking with the executive director and a caseworker. We were very impressed, and felt very secure signing up with this agency. We sent in our application and most of all of the paperwork (because we already had a lot of it from our China paperwork) that was needed the next day - mid-September 2008.

Our agency was able to do their homestudy mid-October and then I spent the next few weeks gathering pictures and information for our portfolio. On November 16, we attended the last requirment for our adoption process, which was an all-day seminar, and we gave our case-worker copies of our completed portfolio at that time. She told us that the next day, November 17, she had 3 birthmothers already to give the portfolio to and that they get about 6 interested birthmothers per week to whom they send family portfolios. That doesn’t mean that all birthmothers who receive portfolios chose a family and go through to complete the adoption. Our agency is relative small and completes about 12 adoptions per year.

All we have to do now is wait. I touched base with our caseworker on Monday just to see how our process is going. She said that our portfolio, along with other families’ portfolios, had gone out to several birthmothers but none of the birthmothers has chosen anyone at this time.

The next step in our Chinese adoption is to send all of our notarized, certified, and authenticated documents to China. However, when we do that, the paperwork accompanies another big, fat check, so Michael and I have decided to wait a little while before moving forward so we can see how everything goes with the domestic adoption. If it’s as smooth and fast (at least faster than China) as we think it’s going to be, then we may, at that time, decide to cancel our Chinese adoption, suck up the money lost, and move forward on a second domestic adoption.

We’ll see - and in the meantime, we’ll wait. :)