Adoption Update

We've known for about 3 weeks that our agency had a full opening in their Caucasian adoption program, but I hadn't posted anything yet. I was waiting until we talked to our social worker, Danielle, so I'd have all the information to post at once. Yesterday J and I had a conference call with Danielle to find out where we go from here.

Right now we are waiting on a verification from the school and from Melody. Once Danielle receives that then she will send it to the social worker in our area who will be doing the homestudy. The social worker in our area lives in the same town I work in and her name is Pam.

Pam will call us and set up a time to do 4 interviews. The #1 one will be J and I together, #2 & #3 will be us individually and #4 will be the home visit and she will also talk to C a little bit. Once she gets through all the interviews it will take approximately 3 weeks to get the report written and submitted to our agency. The agency will then review it and formally accept us into the program.

In the meantime J and I are going to be working on our family profile. There are 3 profiles that will need to be done:

1. Internet Profile - This is a condensed profile that will be on the agency's website so that prospective birthmothers can view it.

2. Short Profile - This is another condensed profile with 3 pictures and 2 pages of written information. This is first shown to a birthmother, if she wants more information then they will give her the long profile.

3. Long Profile - This will be several pages detailing our lives, including several pictures of us. Danielle will be sending us examples to look at the develop all three profiles. The Long Profile starts out with our "Dear Birthparent" letter, so we'll have to also start working on that. I've ordered a digital scrapbooking program that I plan on using to create the long profile.

Once we are fully approved and have all the profiles done is when the waiting begins. Danielle always gives the adoptive parents the worst case scenario on how the long the wait could be. Yesterday she told us it could be as long as 3 years. Of course we are hoping that it will happen sooner, but we all need to be prepared in case it doesn't. The wait time doesn't have anything to do with making sure this is what we want to do, we made that decision a loooong time ago, but for every baby born there are 12 couples who want to adopt it. Our agency works with 15-20 families at a time to try to keep the waiting time to a minimum, but there are no definites on the amount of time we could wait.

Other than the possibility of a long wait, everything else went really well during the call. I think we are both pleased with the agency that we have chosen. Our next big project is the family profile so I've started gathering pictures for that. We are going to have a professional family picture taken in August to use for part of the profile.