Enough with the sob story. Everyone has problems they need to deal with. Lets get the ball rolling again.
Back in December 2011 I started to look into adoption. All I had to go off of was the little "facts" I picked up along the way. The first one that stuck out in my mind was:
You can't adopt an American infant. You have to go international.
This couldn't be farther from the truth. To begin with it is rare to technically adopt an international infant. Most are around 1 years old, which is by no means old but isn't an infant any more either. And you can adopt domestically and be with the baby from his/her first breath. You just don't get any younger than that.
But I didn't know all of this at the start and so I started researching. I found a great website:
http://international.adoption.com/foreign/country-information.html
It has a list of every country that an American can adopt from with the requirments, cost, time frame and facts. Did you know that an American can not adopt from a Western European country? I didn't. So I began to click on the coutnries that I would be interested in adopting from. We had our own criteria of what we were looking for. I found out some interesting facts such as the above mentioned 1 year old thing. Also Poland (where I have heritage from so it was an interesting option) requires you to have some sort of Polish background. Or that in Russia, while you are adopting from that country, foreign adoptees tend to get non-Russian children that were born in Russia. Most countries require some time spent there finalizing paperwork, but Poland was the worst at 1 month. While it would be cool to live there for a month it is not very practical or realistic for us. According to some information, China now has up to a 7 year waitlist. In most countries you can only adopt an orphan - meaning that all family members are deceased or not willing to lay claim to the child. This is why they are usually at least 1 years old before they qualify for foreign adoption. The expense part was breath taking. There are fees that are required for background checks, a homestudy, and legal documents on top of your travel expense and time spent in the other country. Add on to that the fact that most countries also require a donation to the orphanage system that at the highest was $20,000 and it gets pricey quickly. The time frame for foreign adoption isn't all that quick either. There is a ton of paperwork that needs to be completed with the above background checks and homestudy but you also have to create a dossier. This is apparently a very taxing step where you gather your and your partner's birth certificates, school records, immunization records, marriage liscence, current financial statements, health records etc... If 1 thing is off the country will not accept it and it goes back. To give you an idea about how taxing it is there are companies in existence whose sole purpose is to create this for you. Once that is complete and is sent off to the country of your choice you get put on a waitlist. This list is senority rules, so whenever you sign up is the order of placement.
Now there are pros to this form of adoption as well. The list is first come first serve so there is no bias or selection process you have to suffer through. Once you are notified of an available child you can say yes or no after seeing a picture of the child. This means you are 100% sure of gender, birthing issues, health issues etc... No real surprises. You fly over and meet the child and once you sign the papers the child is legally yours. No wait period. Since the child is an orphan there are no parents that may want to interfere or change their mind. The negative is that there are usually minimal or no health records/family records so genetic diseases and such are unknown.
That is the information in a nutshell although there are a lot of loop holes and contingencies I am sure. Having not been through the process all I can report on is the information I gathered from what appears to be reliable sources. After reading through all of this we decided that this wasn't the way to go for us. The expense is unpredictable and the wait time was longer than expected. We also wanted to help a child from our own country. There are so many children that need love in our own backyard that for us it didn't seem right looking elsewhere unless all other options failed.
I then switched to looking into domestic options.
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