When?

Since I got the question today in response to my last post, I thought I would try to answer "when".

When to adopt? Well next month we will have been married 11 years; so I definitely think we have waited long enough to have kids! :) Maybe we have taken it to an extreme but we got married young, and I am thankful for the time we have had with just the two of us. I might just be a slow learner but I feel like I now have an idea of who I am. And I feel like Josh and I have had time to learn about each other, about what battles are worth picking, and how to appreciate each other after the newlywed novelty wears off.

When is our "due date"? Well if we were pregnant we could calculate when we were planning to bring our little one home within a few days or so. With adoption the time frame is not so precise. The short answer is we are guessing about a year from now with the knowledge that 9 months would be short side of average and 2 years would be the long side of average.

Okay, so now if you are someone considering adoption and you want the details, here they are as I understand them:
- Keep in mind that your involvement, your agency, the country, and pretty much everyone and everything involved influences the time frames; as such, everything is just an approximate; i am no expert in this so you can't hold me to any of this
- First you have to do a homestudy. This is where they make sure you have at least some idea of what you are getting into and that you have are prepared for all the things to come. This is what we are just starting right now. Maybe someday when we are done with this part I will tell more about it but right now I am still figuring it all out. So this process takes about 4-5 months.
- Then you wait. I suspect that this might be the hard part. This is when you wait for your agency to get a referral (the info on a child available for adoption) that matches with your family. This can take 1-18 months depending on the program (country) you have selected and how specific who you are looking for.
- Then you travel. I think if you were adopting older children in the US this might be quicker, but for most other countries you travel about 2 months after referral. Depending on the country it might require 1-3 trips. I think 2 trips is common.

Well that wasn't very detailed. Actually it was a bunch of vague generalities. So now you see why "when" is such an unknown. But now you know what I know. Perhaps 6months or a year from now I will find out that what I thought I knew was all wrong. But hey, that's life!