A Long and Winding Road (part 1)

I have really debated about how much detail I should go into in this update of our adoption process. I don't want you to drown in the details. But, I also want to be real and I also love the thought of more people understanding the adoption process better. So, grab your floaties as I begin to share the details...please don't drown! ;)

It really has been a loooooooong road in this adoption process as we try to add another child to our family. We have now been "in process" for almost exactly 19 months.

We were originally in process (at the beginning of the 19 months) with Riley's agency AIAA. After being in process with them for almost 8 months gathering paperwork, updating our homestudy, being fingerprinted, etc... we got a letter saying that things had slowed down and that they had a lot of families waiting to be matched so they weren't sure when the other families would be able to formally apply. We fell into that category of waiting to formally apply. Here was my more detailed post of what happened back then. The short version of it was that we decided to switch agencies since another agency agreed to take our homestudy and let us apply and they were saying that our wait to be matched would be approximately 0-5 months.

The agency we switched to is very reputable...I know many, many families who have worked with them before and been extremely pleased. They are one of the most well-known adoption agencies, so it wasn't at all that we entered into this blindly.

Month after month has gone by without a match. Finally, in the beginning of November I contacted our director. I had started talking to another friend online who was also in process and we started comparing stories. It sounded like our understanding of the wait and the matching process wasn't exactly how it was currently working. When I spoke with the director she said that we should probably look into other agencies because their agency wasn't really seeing any children come through the program with only minor needs.

(Because we are out-of-state we had to submit a medical checklist describing what types of "special needs" we are open to. The things that we are open to at this point in our lives are very, very minor. Some of the more minor "needs" are things like birthmarks or premature birth at 38 weeks. These aren't even things that we consider to be special needs but they are on the checklist.)

Our initial understanding of how the process works (and I think it really did work like this previously) was that babies who had any of the items on the medical checklist were determined by Korea to go into waiting programs. So, then they would see that we were open to X and when a baby had X they would then be matched with us.

Evidently this is not how it works with our agency. Instead, all of the babies are first matched with families in-state who are in the "regular" program. Then, if none of the regular families accepts a baby's referral, THEN the referral is offered to a "waiting" program family. Usually there are 30-40 families in the "regular" program. Those families are constantly being matched and moving off the list and then new families join the list. So, there are almost always about 30-40 families on the list.

Well, in our case because we are only open to pretty minor "needs" most of the "regular" program families would also be open to a baby with those same "needs" meaning that we never even really have a chance of being matched.

At this point in the conversation I was completely devastated. All I can think is how we have "wasted 9 months" with them, we STILL don't have a baby, and we are going to have to start all over.