Excited and terrifed

Me to my husband:  How do you really feel about this?  

T:  Excited.  And terrified.  Mostly excited.  And mostly terrified.

That, my friends, adequately sums up going down the adoption route.

TERRIFYING.  And the most ridiculously exciting adventure ever.

I have yet to find an adoption blog that I can really devour, so I pledge to be that person.  I'll try to keep up with what is going on, our issues, our concerns, and ideally our absolute best day ever when we finally meet our son or daughter.

So, what have we done so far?  Probably way more than most people do a week after a miscarriage.  But we were so ready.  We were ready prior to our "successful" FET, so it didn't take much to make us close this door and move on.  Our chromosomes just aren't compatible, so what do you do?

Anyway, we did pick our adoption agency.  It is American Adoptions out of the Kansas City area.  It didn't take us too long to pick them.  We had done some research after our first IVF, and at that point, had figured out what we didn't want.  So AA ended up meeting all of requirements, and was ultimately a fairly easy choice.

What we considered before committing (all of $200 at this point for the application):

-My parents live in the Kansas City area.  So while this agency is considered to be national, and unlikely we'd actually have to go there, it felt comfortable that it was in an area in which we are very comfortable.

-Any agency will have some bad feedback, but this was one that was mostly positive.  Both from birth parents and adoptive parents.  We also had some local people that used them, and had positive feedback.

-While more expensive than many other agencies, it also focuses on counseling for birth mothers.  So we can feel comfortable that birth mothers were not coerced into a decision, but ultimately came into it on their own.

-AA helps with financial risk...if an adoption is disrupted (e.g. we are "matched" with a birth mother, but she changes her mind and wants to parent later) we are refunded the majority of the fees that we pay.

-We set our own "budget" for the adoption.  A majority of fees are required, but we can define our excess budget beyond that for legal and birthmother expenses.  A higher budget obviously means that you can match with more adoption situations and a lower one may be more limiting, but it is ultimately up to the adoptive parents.  We ended up being in the middle range, as we know we have some flexibility, but didn't want to yet commit to a large budget if it wasn't necessary.

Our major first steps with this agency:

Start our home study.  This is where an agency in our state comes and reviews us.  We have been diligently pulling together documentation for this, and I'll go over it in more detail in a later post. 

We had to fill out an adoption preference questionnaire.  This lays out our race, budget, drug use, medical history, etc preferences.  We can be as open or as limiting as we prefer.  Again, more limiting means less chance of "matching" with a potential mother, but we want to be honest to our own limitations and desires.    

We are working now on references, background checks, and other documentation to fill out.  Once everything is finalized, we can go "active" and be available to birth mothers to choose.

We are SOOOO excited.  And terrified :)  Stay tuned for updates!