Our Story

Part III

The rest of 2009 was pretty uneventful. We had a few calls from our case worker about some possible situations but nothing ever came of them. We are really grateful to our case worker, we really feel that she was trying pretty hard to find a situation that would work for us. At the beginning of this year (2010), we had a home study update and our case worker came to our house to talk to us. I told her that I really felt like we were done, this was not how we were going to grow our family. She asked if we wanted to stay in the system and I told her sure, why not, but I wasn't holding my breath.

In January I received an email from my cousin's wife Allison, they live in Shanghai, China. She expressed that she had been thinking of us and told me about some people she knew who did foster care for Chinese babies who had special needs or medical conditions. She said that many of the babies special needs were very mild, some were more serious, but that they were all eventually going to be adopted through the special needs program. She gave me a name of someone who works at an agency here in Utah and her email and told me if we were interested, we should contact her for more information.

I thought I had nothing to loose so I sent the contact person an email requesting more information about the special needs China program. She immediately sent me the information for the program and told me the program would take about 1 year, start to finish. Steve and I talked about it and that was it.

Around May I was feeling really frustrated. It was time to do something or just move on. After all, we have Zack and he is great and life is sooo much easier the older he gets. Just think of all the fun we could have traveling! I decided to write up all of our options and then Steve and I sat down and wrote out all the pro's and con's together. Some of our options were:
-quit everything and move on
-stay on with LDSFS
-use a private domestic adoption agency
-go through an international agency (then I listed all the country programs we had considered like Africa, China, Korea, Haiti, Taiwan).

I told Steve since I had researched everything for the last 3 years and I was comfortable with all of the options in one way or another, that he needed to decide which one he was most comfortable with. Then we would "think on it". If that option didn't seem to be good, we would move on to his 2nd choice and on down the list.

Steve was quick to say that he liked the idea of adopting from China, since that had been our original desire 3 years ago anyway. I liked his reasoning. After thinking about it for some time, we decided to do it!

I started to research a few agencies, and by June I had it narrowed down to two, one of which was Wasatch International, the agency my cousin had recommended. In July we decided to go with Wasatch and signed up with them officially. We decided to keep it a secret because it takes so blasted long and we were tired of talking about adoption with people. We decided we would tell everyone when we were matched with a child! (Kind of like when you are pregnant and you don't tell anyone until you are far enough along to be comfortable telling people.)

So, why am I telling you this story if we weren't going to tell until we were matched?