Changing Directions, New Look

A new look is called for since we are changing directions. We are still adopting, but after the past few weeks, we've weighed our various options and don't see much of a likelihood that Vietnam will continue adoptions after September 1st and since there is no chance that we will get a referral before that time, we have decided that we must change countries. Our two best options were Ethiopia and domestic here in the United States.



With domestic, you are chosen by the birth mother to parent the child. The waiting list for a healthy white infant could be 2 years or more, it really depends on the birth mother if they choose you or not and there are so many other adoptive parents hoping to be chosen. We would be open to a child of any race or mixture of races; now the expected wait there maybe a year or so (much less than for a Caucasian infant), but the birth mother still has to choose you. There's so many legal loopholes, too; although the agency that we looked at has never had a birth parent take the child back after the child was living in your home, there's always a first time for everything.



With Ethiopia, the current wait is expected to be 6 to 11 months. At this time many people are getting referrals at our agency at about 5-6 months after sending in the dossier. Our current agency works with Ethiopia and gets referrals quite often. Just in the past week there were 8 referrals. Some of our money would transfer over to the new program, not a lot but some of it would. The cost for each of the programs would be similar, since the domestic agency is on a sliding scale when it comes to family. All in all though, they really aren't that expensive compared to some other domestic adoption programs.



So what have we decided, you're asking. Well, we are still waiting for approval from the agency, but we've decided to go with Ethiopia and to stay with CHI as our adoption agency. I'm not sure what is taking so long for approval, but it looks like everything will be a go. We'll need to have our homestudy updated, change over our 171-H to Ethiopia with the Citizenship and Immigration and work on a new dossier.