A Plan

Jeff and I have been busy these past few months gathering as much information about adoption as we can. We've had meetings with several domestic adoption agencies in our state, as well as a consultation with a local adoption attorney. Our heads have been spinning from all the new information and possible  routes to take! There are basically three ways to adopt a child domestically in the United States. The first is through foster care, the second is through an agency, and the third is to do an independent adoption. With an agency adoption, the agency provides all of the services for you. They take care of your pre-placement assessment (home study), assist with matching the birth parents with adoptive parents, and handle all of the legalities after the baby is born. In an independent adoption, you hire an agency to complete your home study only, search for birth parents on your own, and then hire an attorney to assist with the legal part. We're planning to do a combination of the two.

We have decided to work with Children's Home Society of North Carolina. However, to keep wait times down, CHS only accepts couples into their infant adoption program when the number of waiting adoptive couples gets low. We are currently on their wait list, but it will probably be early 2013 before they're ready to accept more couples. Jeff and I are feeling very antsy! We're ready to get started, so we've decided to get going on our home study now (though CHS) and search for birth parents on our own until CHS has an opening for us. We'll most likely advertise on parentprofiles.com after our home study is complete. The adoption attorney we met with told us that the majority of his clients find children through that website.

We started our paper work about a week and a half ago and we're working diligently to finish it as quickly as we can. It will probably take another week or so to finish up. We were both required to get physicals, fingerprints, and background checks. We've had to gather tax returns, our marriage certificate and health insurance information. The most time consuming part so far has been the 40 question "autobiography" that Jeff and I each have to complete. Some of the questions are pretty basic and some are a lot more in depth. If you're curious, here are a few examples:

• What do you regard as your greatest personal achievement to date? Your greatest personal failure? 
•  What are the racial attitudes in your neighborhood and surrounding area? How do they compare with yours?
• What do you do to make the world a better place?
• What are the strong points in your marriage? What are the areas of weakness and disagreement and how do you deal with them?
• What would cause you to consider divorce?
• Describe your relationship with each family member when you were a child and now as an adult.
• Regarding your family with who you grew up, what three things would you choose to continue with your own children?
• What values were conveyed to you by your parents?  How do you feel about these now?
•  Describe your experience in school as a child and as an adolescent?
• What are your religious beliefs? How do you practice these? How do they relate to your spouses’ beliefs?

Some of those are pretty intense, right!? As soon as we finish and submit our paper work, we'll be assigned a social worker who will make several visits to our house. She'll conduct interviews with us together and separately and call our references. Then we'll wait to get (hopefully) approved! We were told that the entire process should take about 6-8 weeks. We're hoping to be "paper ready" or as some people say, "paper pregnant!" by Christmas! YAY!