We've been trying to do a lot of research. It's hard knowing what to do and what to look for when we've never done this before. So, we thought, let's try to find an international adoption agency. Catholic Family Center had a list of agencies they trust and partner with. So, we decided to start there. Long story short, it was pretty overwhelming.
Each country has its own set of requirements for parents. Common ones are like you must fit in a certain age range, you have to be married for a certain amount of years and you cannot have more than a certain amount of children already in the home. It's kind of complicated, but for people like us who started the process pretty open to where we would adopt from, it really helped narrow things down, at least some.
It was a little disheartening to find out how long the process could take. For most of the countries we qualified for in this initial phase of research, it could take at least 2 years before we would have our child home with us. That's a long time for someone who would love to adopt a child now... I know that's not realistic, but I didn't really know what realistic was, and it seemed that was more realistic and I was not too excited.
One of the major overwhelming factors was how expensive it could be to adopt internationally. It can be as much as >$40k depending on the country you are adopting from and the agency you are using. That's a lot of money. I know children are priceless, but I still felt overwhelmed, and admittedly, I lost track of how much God is. More than $40k, that's for sure.
So, at the time, we didn't really know what to do with all this information. How do we make a decision?
We needed to talk to someone who's done it before.
No comments:
Post a Comment