Thu 8 Nov 2007
I realized the other day that this journal has been long (sometimes very very long) in information about specific events, or emotional issues, or weird people sitting next to me at the fingerprint office, or things of that nature, but we’ve never really taken the time to give people a good idea of what the process looks like.
Here, then, is the high-level overview of the whole process, including how far along the path we already are:
- Decide to adopt Done!
- Decide on an adoption “path” (domestic/international, open/closed, infant/child, etc) Done!
- Find an agency to work with Done!
- Our agency’s specific steps
- Attend the informational seminar in Portland Done!
- Submit paperwork, fingerprints, documents, etc Done!
- Meet with counselor for Intake interview Tomorrow!
- Homestudy process – in-home interviews with counselor (2-4 months)
- More paperwork – biographies, photo collages, letters of recommendation, etc. (2-4 months, simultaneous with step 4)
- Preparing our home and lives (2-4 months, simultaneous but nearer the end of with steps 4 & 5)
- Jumping in the pool! (Early next year?)
- Waiting for the call… biting our fingernails… obsessively checking our voicemails… (could be 3 weeks… could be 3 years.)
- The call!
- Meeting the birthmother and making sure that this is the right fit (This “usually” happens 3 months before the birth, and can take a few appointments before everyone is comfortable. It could, however, happen in just a couple of hours, if the birthmother first contacts the agency after the birth and the process is accelerated.)
- Mediation – establishing agreements, attending any additional counseling, figuring out details. (Shortly after step 10.)
- Birth!
- Legal stuff that I probably should have been paying more attention to during the seminar, but I dismissed as “I know I’ll forget this, so I’ll study it again when we’re closer to the date” (Few days, most likely)
- Baby time!
So! That’s a rough outline of the process. Obviously, the only things set in stone so far are the very first steps (deciding to adopt and the adoption method we’ve chosen), and it could turn out that when we meet our counselor tomorrow, it just feels like a bad fit, either from their perspective or from ours, and we’ll have to start again at step 3 again. (I actually had a bad dream the other night in which Betsy and I were at a restaurant, and our waitress recognized us and let us know that the whole adoption community was abuzz about how angry our counselor was after finding “that little website of yours”.) But based on the information I’ve gotten from them so far, I’m feeling pretty comfortable that we’ll be able to work together pretty well.
So, we’re on to the next step tomorrow – the intake interview with our new counselor, who will be our guide the rest of the way. Wish us luck!