The Process

I know, you're thinking, two posts in one day... What? I've been working a bit more lately and haven't had time to update much.... and I had two completely differing thoughts, so we split them up into two posts. So here. we. go.

I get a lot of questions about the process of the adoption, how we chose an agency, why we are adopting from Florida, and where we are at now. So I wanted to kind of use this post as a way of telling you some of the steps in this process and where are are at now.

So when deciding to pursue an international adoption in Saskatchewan, you first need to file an application with the Ministry of Social and Services and be approved by them for this adoption. On the application, you must have already picked a country to adopt from and one specific agency to work with. The agency we are working with is called adoption by Shepherd care. They are located in Florida and we chose them for many reasons. When I began contacting agencies from the list of legitimate, qualified agencies (that I got from social services), many of them didn't get back to me very quickly, some not at all! It was an incredibly frustrating time. This agency got back to me quickly, continued to answer my ridiculous amount of questions and were amazing about it. That was a huge thing for me, if I was going to be spending big bucks, I wanted to at least do it with an agency that communicates well with us. One of the biggest contributing factors in the decision though, for us, was this agencies experience with adopting children specifically to Saskatchewan. They adopt many children every year to Canada, and did about 5-6 adoptions to Saskatchewan alone last year. Seeing as we have no idea what's what and this is so new to us, we really valued their experience. The one downfall, that we found with this agency, was simply that because so many Canadians want to adopt from the USA, their Canadian program was currently closed (to keep wait times short) and would be for about another six months. We didn't really want to wait, but we found that this agency was worth a few extra months of childlessness.

So we filled out our application for Social services, picked the agency. We then had to meet with Social Services and there they kind of got to know us and see why we wanted to adopt, etc, etc and we were approved by Saskatchewan ministry of Social Services! The next step is to get the home study portion done. The home study involves a qualified person, coming into your home and going through your life with a fine toothed comb. From financials, to sex, to views on disciplining..... it will be very invasive.... they want to make sure that we aren't psychos and are going to care for the child we are going to adopt. As a side note.... to go through all this... as it's not a simple process.... you would really need a desire to want and love that child, so I don't know who would do this to get a child to neglect... just saying! Anyways this is currently where we are. We haven't quite started our home study process, but anticipate it will be beginning soon. We are waiting to get the go ahead from our agency in the USA. Your home study needs to be update annually, so we don't want to waste time and money by having it done too early. Timing is key!

So after the home study is finished. The social worker person that does our home study will write up a report and we will then apply to our agency. Based on our application and the home study report, the agency will then accept us (I have been reassured that we will really only be denied if we are crazies, have histories that we haven't been honest about, etc... so we should be good) and then we will be actively waiting. Thankfully during this time that we have been waiting for the agency, we have been able to work on our adoption profile. This is what prospective birth moms will look at when choosing which family to place their baby with. Ours is still getting perfected, but should be ready soon!

So there are a couple ways our story could work out. A mom who is pregnant usually 4-5 months will pick us and then we will wait the arrival of our little one! Or we could receive a phone call saying that a mom did pick us and the baby is sitting in the hospital waiting for us to come get it ! (this thought kind of scares me a bit). So when a mom picks us, we will receive a file on her and her health history and all the info pertaining to the baby's prenatal health and what not and we can choose to accept or deny the offer.

Once our baby is born, the mom will sign the adoption papers either two days after birth or upon her discharge from the hospital, whichever is first. Once she has signed, she can't change her mind. There is no revocation period in the state of Florida. So we will then go down to Florida, pick up our baby, stay there for about a week to figure out all the legal stuff, immigration stuff and then return to Canada with our baby! After our return we have some post placement studies that need to be done with the person who did our home study. Then we update the mom monthly on baby for the first year and then annually until baby is 18.

So that's the process in a nutshell. We have started fundraising so early because where we are at right now.... everything from this point on costs money. Our home study costs about $2000 (not including potential updates or post placement studies), when we apply and get accepted to the agency we have to pay about another $2000, when a birth mother picks us and we accept we need to pay between $5000 - $8000 to help pay for her expenses (living expenses, counselling, medical bills, etc) and when we go down to get our child we will need to pay the $14,000 in agency fees as well as a lot of money for all the different legal documents and passports and what not that we will need in order to bring our baby back to Canada. None of this includes our travel expenses.

As far as a wait time, Once we are in with the agency, the agency says the wait time is about 9 - 18 months.

So, I hope I was able to as clearly as possible explain a bit of the process! Citizenship and Immigration is another huge thing that I still haven't wrapped my head around, so maybe I'll explain that when I understand it!

Look forward to seeing you guys at the banquet! Buy tickets now!