April 30th, 2009

As we continued our research on Internation adoption, we also started looking for an adoption agency. Unless you are Madonna, you need to use a Hague Certified country along with a country certified adoption agency here in the USA. So our search was two-fold. Find a country that met our requirements, and find an agency that did the same. Country was easy. India won't let you adopt unless you are of Indian descent. Scratch that off the list. Other countries didn't allow you to have a prior divorce, or you had to be married for at least 5 years, or when the adoption time came you had to stay in country for 45 days or more. So we just went down the list of countries and kept removing them from the list. As the list got shorter and shorter, only one country kept coming up...Bulgaria. It was relatively cheap (as compared to say, China), we met all the requirements, and it was starting to look really good. A couple of internet horror stories about the orphanages in former Soviet Block countries notwithstanding, it looked like we had found our country. The only drawback that we could find was the program itself. It was recently closed as Bulgaria worked toward gaining acceptance to the EU, and had just opened up, so basically it was a untested program. No one from the US had done an adoption there in years, so we had no idea what to expect...

April 20th, 2009

With domestic adoption out of the running, we turned our hearts towards the International community. The internet provided us with hours and hours of pages, information, videos, you name it. We started off by learning about the various countries and cultures that were available, and also by learning about Hague Convention countries. Hague Convention countries are a group of countries that have similar rules and requirements in regards to adoptions. They have to follow certain rules, etc, to protect both the prospective parents and the children. We very early on decided that we had to have a Hague country.

April 15th, 2009

By this time, adoption ideas were coming fast and furious. Domestic? International? We started looking into each. We were put off by the fact that most domestic adoptions are done through foster care placement. This is great for the kids, but not so much for parents who just want to adopt and be done with it. It would require that we become foster parents and then wait for an adoptable child to come along. Foster parents are given first choice in the state of Ohio, so the only children that come up for adoption by non foster parents are older children, usually with a lengthy list of problems and issues. We decided that we didn't want to become foster parents (a most noble thing, but not for us) and we didn't want an older child with a lot of baggage.

April 4th, 2009

Ah, springtime, but still no signs of life for us. By this time we have resorted to fertility pills and mapping out the best times for ovulation. Nothing. Zip. Nada. We started to become frustrated with our situation, and the next step was in vitro fertilization. It was around this time that we also began to look at other options. I was always aware of adoption as an option, and started to explore the various scenarios. Rani began looking into the IVF procedure, and decided two things, she didn't want to be poked and prodded, and that the procedure has a very low success rate and is very expensive (and not covered by our insurance). We began to talk about adoption as a viable option to start our family.