"Adoption 101: The 4 Step Process."
Step 1: Make the decision to adopt and choose an agency.
This is a very big, very scary for many people, and a very important step. It includes getting a lot of information about how different agencies work (very differently) and making a decision and usually some kind of payment to your agency of choice. (With LDS Familly Services, it is a very reasonable $1000.00.)
You get a case worker and a very large stack of paper (or passwords to a very large stack of electronic online forms).
Step 2: The Application Process, Home Study and Approval.
After selecting an agency, you spend the next 2-6 months getting approved. The process includes:
1. Filling out an obscene amount of information including statistical (age, weight, race, location, etc.), financial (pretty much your taxes, plus your assetts, debts, and credit report), personal (likes and dislikes, hobbies, interests, relationships, career, education, etc.), religious (bishop writes a letter), and finally legal (birth certificates, marriage certificates, authorizing criminal background checks, etc.).
2. The Home Study: In addition to providing information on your home and everyone in your family, you prepare your home for a safety inspection.
3. The Profile: Summarize your life stories, everything that you value and that is important to you, your personalities, testimonies, etc. on one piece of paper. Don't worry, you get to use both sides :) Then you get to use both sides of an additional piece of paper to create an illustration of your family (a picture collage).
This is what a birth mother will use to chose you, so no pressure. ;)
(Can you tell this was the hardest part for me).
3A) After all this was approved, LDS Family Services switched to a new online profile system, so we got to build another profile online. We like the new system. It is not limited in the amount of information or pictures you can include (and as far as I can tell, it is not biased towards people with the ability to scrapbook). They may not require the physical profiles anymore.
Step 3: The Waiting/ Finding Game
LDS Family Services calls the next stage the Finding Stage. But, I think most adopting couples call it the Waiting Stage. There are lots of creative (and many might say awkward) things people can do to get the word out that they are adopting. Many people send their friends and family a letter and profile that they can share with anyone they may run across who is considering adoption. Some people purchase advertising online or in other sources. Slightly less assertive are methods such as sharing with people you know that you are trying to adopt. My good friend made beautiful "business" cards to hand out that included the information that they were trying to adopt.
And of course, your profile is out there on "itsaboutlove.org" for anyone searching to find.
There is no waiting list. There is not really an "estimated time to arrival." It could be 10 days or 10 years. Someday, a birth mother chooses to give her baby an eternal family with a mom and a dad, and from the thousands and thousands of waiting couples, she chooses you.
Step 4: Placement and Finalization
See, the question "How's the adoption going/ or how is it coming along..." Unless someone is in the process of an overseas adoption (which is an extensive process that does come along) or unless they are working with a birthmother before a birth or placement, adoptions don't "come along." You just wait... and wait... and wait... and then they happen. Sometimes suddenly. Sometimes you have a few weeks to get to know your birthparent(s) and get ready for the new arrival.
Please check out our updated profile, and yes we would LOVE feedback! :)
(PS I wrote this a couple of months ago, and am just getting around to posting it).
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