Step 1: Homestudy and Adoption Agency Applications

This week Kevin and I have taken the first big step in our adoption process. We sent applications and checks out to the home study and adoption agencies that we've chosen. We'd like to work with Adoption Support Center in Indianapolis, Indiana, to do our home study. They seem very professional and organized. I've talked to and corresponded to several people in Indiana who've used them and I like what I'm hearing. All adoptions start with a home study that is performed by a social worker to evaluate the adopting parents' commitment to adoption, explore your reasons you want to adopt and your commitment to adopt, evaluate you as a prospective parent, and provide education about adoption. No, this isn't a white glove test to make sure your house is clean enough to adopt! We've also sent off our application to Families for Children's Taiwan Program.

We started out in this process all excited about adopting from China. I've been talking about wanting to visit China for a vacation in the last year after reading about some of the trips that the Ambassair Travel Club offers. In my Change and Tradition humanities class in college, my favorite section was on Chinese History. We read from the Tao Te Ching, learned about Confucianism, and enjoyed folk stories. Kevin's been using the Rosetta Stone software to learn some Mandarin. I think he needs to work on pronunciation a little bit more. We visited our friend Susan that owns a local Chinese restaurant and he was way off on some words. Susan seemed to really get a kick out of Kevin trying his Mandarin on her, and we've had a lot of fun with that. The only word I remember is the word for cat, which interestingly sounds a little like a "meow" very forcefully.

The growing and growing and growing wait time for referral and rumors on rule changes with China have us scared off. We started looking at programs to adopt from Vietnam and Taiwan, and we're really excited about Taiwan. With China, the majority of children are female infants abandoned within a few days of birth because of China's one child (or two child in come cases) policy. For lots of reasons too complicated to go into by me, it is seen as a necessity to have a male child rather than a female child. Kevin and I bought a National Geographic Video on the subject that is really good. Anyway, the children available for adoption in Taiwan are both male and female. The birthmothers in Taiwan are often young unmarried girls unprepared to raise a child or their birth parents can not take care of them for economic reasons. Adoption agencies in Taiwan work directly with orphanages to place the children into homes. In contrast, the matching in China is done by a government agency called the CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs). I like the idea of knowing that our child would have better access to information on her birthparents if she wants it someday, and that we can travel freely to Taiwan without a VISA on return trips. Ahh. That's enough for now!