Our Adoption Journey

Here we're at the LA Times Festival of Books a couple of weeks after our wait began.
 Ah, the bliss of the newly waiting... 

What has our adoption journey looked like? You may remember we wrote a three part series on our story as a couple and said we'd write more about adoption in another post. Well, here it is. In this post we'll look at the road we're traveling on to become parents through adoption. You'll see this is a bit of a long post, but it's also been a long journey.

Summer 2009 - We kept trying to get pregnant, but started to realize that it wasn't working out. Adoption had always been something we discussed and we began to think about it more as the summer went on. We started reaching out to family and friends and through them met new friends who were in the process of adoption or had already adopted. Susan also went to a meeting of the original Resolve adoption support group here in Southern California. While meeting two other women to talk about adoption really inspired Susan, unfortunately it turned out to be the first and only meeting of that original group.

December 2009 - The Resolve adoption support group reformed under a different leader. We were inspired by the successful adoption stories we heard at that meeting and started to really think about how adoption was more consistent with us and our values than continuing to pursue the options reproductive science offered. We went to the first meeting of the new group and have been going as often as we can ever since.

March 2010 - Concluded that despite our best efforts we were probably not going to be able to conceive a child. Researched adoption agencies and planned meetings with two in Southern California.

May 1, 2010 - Attended IAC's orientation session in Orange County, California. We began to understand the nature of open adoption and found that it really appealed to us rather than fostering or international adoption. We discussed what adoption with IAC would look like and how the process would work. The next step with IAC was their weekend intensive, but you sign your contract with them that weekend and we needed a little more time before we were ready to commit.

July 30-31, 2010 - Went on the IAC's weekend intensive which is a mini crash course on many aspects of adoption. Signed our contract with IAC and learned about the steps we would need to take to get our home study done.

August 2010 - Began the challenge of completing the home study questionnaires and written autobiographies required for our home study interview. We each needed to answer 24 questions about our childhood, adolescence, and teenage years in the autobiographies we wrote.

Fall 2010 - Completed our home study questionnaires and autobiographies. Then moved on to all the other paperwork including getting DMV records, physicals, LiveScan fingerprints for the FBI and Department of Justice, letters of recommendation, and more. (Thank you again to MC, AI, and PB for helping us out with those letters.) Read two IAC required books, "Children Of Open Adoption And Their Families" and "Inside Transracial Adoption". The first is required for all waiting parents, the second was our choice from a list of about 10 elective books.

November 2010 - A whirlwind of obsessive housecleaning ultimately concludes in a successful home study.

December 2010 - We realize our home study is done, but our adoption letter isn't. We try to hunker down and get the letter done, only to realize that it's harder than we thought and the holidays aren't a great time for the project. The letter with its 1000 words of text and 12 or so photos takes much longer than we planned. The challenge is made even more difficult when we realize we have very few photos that will work for the letter. (We never really took a lot of photos before this process.) We soldier on through the letter process for 4 months despite many obstacles including the absurd struggle of trying to design a letter using Publisher 2000 on a Windows 7 computer.

January 2011 - IAC introduced an online course which was required for those couples open to transracial adoption so we took a short break from the adoption letter to complete this course.

March 2011 - Started our Facebook page and continued to work on getting our adoption letter approved.

April 2011 - Adoption letter approved and printed. Completed online adoption profile on IAC's website iHeartAdoption.org and went "live" with IAC as a waiting family.

August 2011 - Updated FBI LiveScan Fingerprints

January 2012 - Took a serious look at our outreach efforts to find a match. We realized we needed to do much more and created our own website and blog.

March 2012 - Went to our doctor to update our physicals. Expanded our online outreach efforts to include Pinterest and Twitter. Met with our adoption coordinator to update our home study and discuss what the next steps were at our one year mark.

April 2012 - 12 months of waiting. Added to IAC's last minute hospital list. Signed up for an online profile at America Adopts as another way to get our message out online. Ordered more printed copies of our adoption letter.

June 2012 - We began advertising on Facebook at the suggestion of our IAC coordinator. We've been advertising on both Facebook and Google ever since.

July 2012 - Went on a short trip to Las Vegas after realizing that not only had it been 8 years since we were there, but also that we needed new adventures if we were going to stay sane during our wait. The Las Vegas trip was the first step of doing different things for us while we wait. We let ourselves go "fair crazy" with passes to the OC Fair this year and we just got annual passes to Disneyland. We going to continue to look for fun things to do during our wait, either that we've never done before or that we haven't done in a while.

September 2012 - Updated FBI LiveScan fingerprints.

October 2012 - 18 months of waiting. Received and completed IAC paperwork for their task force which allows us to receive extra advice and assistance with our journey. Starting to prepare to update our adoption letter, hopefully before we need to order more printed copies. Still mulling the prospect of creating a YouTube video to help get our message out.

Please keep in mind that every adoption story is different. While there are many common points we share with other waiting parents, there are parts of our journey that are unique. Many prospective parents complete items on this timeline much quicker than we did and many wait for a lot less time than us. We don't want to scare anyone off with our timeline, but we've also tried to detail events as realistically as possible. In retrospect there are several things we'd probably do differently and it's easy to see ways we could have streamlined some of the process now that we have the benefit of hindsight. We also have some thoughts and even some tips on preparing for what we call "the long haul". Stay tuned for our next post.