Child Adoption Steps

Video Transcript

"The steps that we took to adopt our two children were very similar. First of all in our case because we did it internationally, we had to find an agency and we did find All Gods Children and from that period once you find the agency then you send in typically some kind of fee saying that you are interested and that you actually do want to adopt a child using there services and then they send you a contract. You sign the contract and send back the money and they send you a whole packet of information that you need to take care of and the packet of information has, if they are a good agency, will have a whole list of the things that you are supposed to do. Like, they will tell you things like you need to be fingerprinted, you need to go get security checks done, background clearances to make sure that everything is okay, you need to get a social worker and the social worker will walk you through steps that she needs to clear your home as a going to be a loving and stable environment for any children that are brought into and after you are done with those particular steps and there is a lot more than that. Then there is just the paperwork stuff that you have to do. We had to have copies of our marriage license and our birth certificates and they all have to be state certified so you need to send those off and they get that certification process done and so you end up with a huge packet of papers which is commonly known as the dossier and your dossier just keeps getting bigger and bigger and everybody has their method for organization. I am definitely not the most organized person in the world, so I took tips from other people, a lot of people keep folders with different things and they put tabs o them for "done" and "not done". I had a front and back section for things "that yet to be completed" and I would just put a blank sheet of paper in what I was waiting for and then take out the blank sheet when the right one came in, but you end up with a significant amount of paper and typically the agency does not want anything until you are completely done so it becomes a thing on your part to keep doing it and it is not something you can do in a day. I know people have done it very short periods of time but typically it takes people months to get these papers all together and once all the papers are all together then you send those back in and then you are usually put on the waiting list. Usually send in your fees along the way and things like that but then you are put on the waiting list. In my case I think the program is changed now and it is a little bit longer wait but we signed our contract in November of 2001, almost to the day, a year from the time that we had signed the contract and we got on the waiting list in July, my daughter was actually born in July so we were on the waiting list about I think only a couple of months before we got the call that she was born and then from July to November is the end of the paperwork phase, you certainly have enough paperwork to send in, you need power of attorney so they can continue on and you do a few other things like that but in that period time you are basically just waiting and our agency is wonderful so every month we got an update with how our daughter was doing. She was actually in an orphanage for that time period and then the people called "Special Mothers" that took care of her and finally in November of 2001 we went and picked her up ourselves and within what we were down there for four or five days, and then we brought her home and she came to live with us in her forever family."