Filling out the Application

Overwhelming.  That is about the only word to describe the pile of paperwork needing to be completed when applying to an adoption agency.  However, like the meme suggests, there are just some things worth spending time on!

For our agency the necessary documents include:

-detailed application: covers all basic information about your family including financials 

-criminal record check

-request for intervention check (to see if the ministry of families has been involved in any situations...so, probably a good idea)

-medicals

-letter from employers confirming employment and salary

-statement of faith

-4 reference forms: 1 pastor, 1 coworker, 2 friends... people who have known you for more than 3 years

-a 12 page photo album of your family/life (more pictures than words)  This is your profile book that will be shown to the birthparents.  It doesn't need to be completed until your application is approved.

And finally, the dreaded...

-Home Assessment Self Report:  This document can be completed after sending in all of the aforementioned forms, but will take a while!  In this report, you are asked to answer just under 80 questions about yourself from topics like, personality, health, education, employment history, religion, family history, relationships, home and community, and motivation to adopt.  For Ben and I, this took us about 10-12 hours each.  Some of the questions require a short answer and others and couple of sentences.  We wrote our answers in paragraph form.  

This kind of questioning can at first feel somewhat intrusive, but the beauty of it is that it is actually meant to prepare you for the interview aspects of the application screening.  By getting us to answer all of these questions we had to do a lot of thinking about our lives, past and present.  We had to think about the strengths and weaknesses of our marriage, and the reasons that we were hoping to adopt.  It's one thing to think that we would be able to answer those questions in an interview, but getting the chance to hash things out in conversation and writing over a week or two is such a blessing!

The finished document says a lot about who we are as a family and was a great way for the ladies at the agency to get to a deep understanding of us in a short time.  

I think that I remembered all of the forms here!  Really, it took me about a month to have all of those things completed, not including the photo album.  The hardest parts are the ones that require getting someone else involved, like the medicals, references, employer letter and criminal record check.  That, and having enough quiet time to write 18 pages single-spaced for the Home Study Self Report!

In my next post I'll write about the meetings that we had with the ladies from the agency, including the Home Study, dun, dun, dun...

And the story begins part 2

The decision to adopt now had been an easy one.  We had considered it years earlier, before Logan, and said that we would probably revisit the idea later on.  We were so excited to get the process started!  We feel that being called to this amazing path will be such a blessing to us.  We are learning so much with every step that we take.  

When the time came for us to put some real adoption plans into place I started researching online.  We didn't know very much at this point about what agencies were out there, or which one we should choose.  I had known of families who had adopted or were currently adopting through Christian Adoption Services, so that was the first agency that I looked into.  There are two other private adoption agencies in Alberta as well, Adoption By Choice, and Adoption Options.  I made a few phone calls and ordered the application packages.  When speaking with the ladies at the agencies it became apparent that the statistics for how long families wait before they have a child placed is very similar among the agencies.  Usually, you are waiting two to three years.  Of course, there is a chance of a shorter wait period and a chance at a longer one.  With birthmothers choosing the family for their child, it doesn't go in the order of how long a family has waited.

In the end, we decided to go with Christian Adoption Services for a couple of reasons.  When I phoned, I was able to talk to someone who had been with the agency for 20 or more years.  She was knowledgeable and kind, and ready to answer my questions.  The cool thing was, I told her that I really didn't know what to ask, that I was trying to determine which agency we should apply with, but that I didn't even know where to start!  She then told me all of the basics, including what things I should weigh when making our choice.  One of biggest things that solidified our choice was that the agency is small.  We have a chance to KNOW the ladies who work there, and they KNOW who we are as well.  Since there are about 20-30 waiting families, we are not lost in a crowd.  I'm not sure how big Adoption by Choice is, but at Adoption Options, there were over 150 waiting families when I contacted them.  When I phone CAS (Christian Adoption Services) or send an email we get a quick reply from one of the ladies that we've met or already spoken with on the phone.  I know that it might sound like a small thing, but when going through something as emotionally charged and personal as an adoption application, home study, wait period, and actual adoption, I appreciate knowing who the small group of ladies are that we will be working with.  The other clincher for us, is their mandate.  Not only are they facilitating adoptions, they are doing it with the worldview of Christianity.  Their mission is to "demonstrate the love and compassion of Jesus Christ by placing children in permanent and loving families."  Sharing a faith in God really helped us to connect with CAS.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the other two agencies would have been excellent choices as well; we just had to go with the good feeling we got after speaking with CAS.

Once we had made our decision and got working on the application package, the feeling of urgency was pretty strong!  All of a sudden, knowing that the application and home study would take several months was a painful thought.  Why hadn't we started this earlier?

This is getting to be a pretty long post, so I will continue with the application process in my next post.  

And the story begins, part 1

Ben and I started dating in 1999, and after four years we got married.  A few years later we gave ourselves a deadline.  We said that by the time Ben was 28 (2009) we needed to have a plan for how we would start our family.  Until then, we would just continue on as we were, both working on our careers and enjoying our time together as a couple.  That time flew by!  Ben was working full time as a power engineer, renovating our lakehouse, playing hockey, and playing around with his old car.  I was teaching elementary school, playing soccer and hockey, and coaching volleyball.  We had a lot going on and were really enjoying our life together.  However, as we got closer and closer to Ben turning 28, we thought that we better starting talking about IT.  

We knew what our options were, adoption and surrogacy.  I knew for 100% sure that my body can never carry a pregnancy, and honestly, that was a pretty big blessing for us.  Though I don't think the pain of infertility will ever fully go away for me, I had had several years to comes to terms with it.  I had thought a lot about what the reason might be that I have this issue...perhaps a different call on my life than what I would have expected.  Also, because I knew at a young age (before marriage) that I would never carry a baby, Ben and I didn't have to go through the years of trying to conceive and failing, or painful and expensive IVF treatments.  We knew what our situation was and we knew what our choices were.  BTW, when you tell your boyfriend of three months that you know for sure you will never carry a baby (I thought that it would be a deal breaker, so I said it early), and he says, "I love you more today than I did yesterday," you know you have a keeper.  

So, in order for surrogacy to happen, you have to have someone offer to do this for you (In some other countries women do this for a fee, not Canada).   Carrying a baby for someone else is just one of those things that about 99.99% of women are unable/unwilling to do, and we knew this.  Though the idea of surrogacy was amazing, we were not counting it as a realistic option for us.  Adoption was on the table!  Before we had a chance to get anywhere with adoption, a bombshell came!

There was someone willing to be a surrogate mother and carry a child for us!  Never did we think that this was going to happen, but we jumped in with both feet!  If you want to check out how our surrogacy journey went, our amazing surrogate mother wrote a blog about the entire thing, and here is the address: beautifulsurrogacy.blogspot.ca.   Everything went extremely well and we were blessed with our son, Logan, in 2010!

When Logan was two years old, we tried again because we had embryos still frozen that we could never discard (those who don't believe in an embryo being life might discard these, sadly).  To us, the embryos were our possible children, and we hoped so deeply for them to join our family.  However, the Lord, in His wisdom, didn't allow that for us.  It is still hard now, after almost two years, to think about the loss that we incurred at that time.  Thankfully, we know that God has ours lives in His hands and that we need to wait on His timing if we are to be blessed with another child... not an easy thing to wait for.  God has something else in store for us though!  We know it!  We believe that the Lord is faithful and that we can trust Him!

Isaiah 55:8-9: "My thoughts are completely different from yours," says the Lord.  "And my ways are far beyond anything you can imagine.  For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts."

This is us back in 2010, a few months before our son, was born.

In part 2, I will write about our decision to apply to adopt and describe what we have done so far to get there.