I've read MANY other's adoption blogs and found them to be very helpful. I'm hoping that this blog will be a help to others who are considering an international adoption. Justin and I are hoping to adopt a little girl from Eastern Europe. We will be revealing more details as time goes on, but we won't be revealing her country of origin on this blog. Though if you are very close to us or know anything about her country, you will probably figure it out! Justin and I decided that we are going to do everything within our control to make this adoption happen as fast as possible. That way we can hopefully be more patient when the parts we can't control (US and foreign government stuff) takes longer than we would like.
I will go into more details on the steps we've taken so far, but here's a quick rundown and the timeline. On Friday, June 29th we sent our application to the Reece's Rainbow partner agency. We sent it USPS Priority Mail and it made it all the way across the country in 3 days including a weekend. Not bad for the USPS! We were matched by the agency on Tuesday, July 3rd. This is only a match with the agency; not a match in her country.
We attended a homestudy agency orientation on Monday and though we really liked the agency, they were geared more toward foster/adopt placements and we felt that they wouldn't get the homestudy done as fast as we wanted. We are hoping for no more than 8 weeks. We found another great homestudy agency in the Bay Area who actually places children from "little girl's" country, and they will get started on our homestudy as soon as they process our application. I was waiting to speak with someone from the agency before I sent off the application. I spoke with her and she told me to go ahead and send not only the application but also the retainer agreement (a long, legal document) with checks for the fees, that way they could assign us a social worker right away. Well once she said that, I decided we needed to get this done TODAY. I highly encouraged Justin to drive home as fast as he could from work to sign these extra documents while I put together yet another USPS Priority Mail envelope (3rd this week). Justin made it to the Raley's drop off just in time.
Oh, and I also sent off my passport for renewal. I still had 5 years left on it but it was still in my maiden name so that needed to be changed. Whew! What a busy but productive week. Another week closer to "little girl"!
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