Getting Started
Figuring out where to start was definitely a time I could have used that network of parents who had experience with adoption. I spent a lot of time researching online.
We started out by signing up to attend open houses being held by agencies we could potentially work with. Our first one was with a private agency in our state that handled infant adoptions. We also looked into our state agency to learn about adopting an older child who was in foster care.
We learned a lot about children in foster care. Some states have state agencies, while others have county agencies. We were told it is unlikely to get an infant, or even a toddler, from foster care. The goal of foster care is to reunite a child with his/her biological parents. Agencies work with the parents for a specific time frame. In our state it’s 18 months. If reunification is not possible after that time, they work to find another family member to take the child, then people outside the family who know the child. Next the foster family the child has been placed with may have the opportunity to adopt. Otherwise they begin to look at other foster families.
While we did not care to foster, we decided we wanted to adopt a child who was in foster care. Once we opened our minds to an older child, we were okay with not experiencing the infant and toddler years with our child. Our choice to adopt came from wanting to be a family for a child who didn’t have one, not because we could not have biological children.
Another choice we made early on was that we wanted to better our chances of finding a child we would be a good match for, which meant considering children outside of our home state. Our state agency would only assist us if we adopted within our state of residence. This is where we felt like we hit a roadblock. Was adopting a child from another state possible if we weren’t interested in fostering?
My earlier online research led me to a website http://www.adoptuskids.org. I decided to call them to see if they could point me in the right direction, and they did! Our next step was to find a private agency in our state that would do a home study for an interstate adoption (adopting from a state other than where the parents reside). There was a long list of agencies to go through. I selected a few I liked at first glance. The first one or two only focused on infant adoption. The next agency I reached out to responded to me quickly saying they thought they could help, and I would hear from the supervisor the next day. And I did hear from him the next day. We scheduled a time to meet in person at the agency office.
Our first meeting with Adoptions From the Heart (https://afth.org) was to learn about the Home Study process and that this agency could help us adopt the way we had hoped.
