Journey Continues....

At the orientation class, I can honestly say I was checking out the "competition". I thought my husband and I are both young, medical professionals with a big house and yard with stable jobs that have no children of our own. What more could DSS want in potential parents? I forgot to mention that when we started our journey we wanted to adopt a single child less than a year old. And we were told that there were very few children that become available in this age range. So at the orientation class we were told all the steps we would have to go through to become approved for adoption. We would have to have a home visit from the Fire Marshall and DHEC. We would also need to fill out a 20 page application for each person in our home (including financial statements, a health assessment to be filled out by a doctor, and vaccination records for our pets). Also we would have a home study completed by a social worker that would need to meet with us on two separate occasions. Also we would need to attend three Saturday adoption classes. Most people would feel overwhelmed by these demands but I was excited to have something to work towards. In less than two weeks I had everything ready for our inspections and the applications completed. Unfortunately the waiting period for the adoption classes was several months and they would not start our inspections until after we completed the Saturday classes. Finally in June 2009 we completed our adoption classes. By September we had our inspections complete and were just waiting on our home study. Finally in October the social worker began making her visits to complete our home study. She asked more personal questions that I thought were possible (family history, why my parents got divorced, what our relationship with our family is currently, our miscarriages and fertility treatments, etc). By December all I wanted for Christmas was to get our final approval letter. It didn't come until February 2010. It has now been nine months since we were approved and have not found our match yet. We are eligible for out of state matches. Since our approval we also have decided to increase our age range to five years old and would be willing to accept a sibling group of two. I continue to search the internet for children available in other states that match what we are looking for. We have submitted our home study to several children from other states (Florida, Alabama, Utah, Texas, etc) but have not been chosen for those children. SC DSS has called us once with a potential child, however this child was on a ventilator, blind, had a seizure disorder,etc and we felt their medical problems were too extensive for us. So this brings you up to speed on where we are at currently. In the next post I will elaborate on the children we are currently submitted on and are awaiting answers.

Journey So Far

I have decided to start this blog as a way to keep track of our adoption journey and also for my own personal therapy/sanity. Needless to say our journey so far has been long and the waiting has been difficult. My husband and I met in December 2003 and got married in October 2005. We decided to wait to have children until I graduated nursing school so we could provide a wonderful, stable life for our family. We started trying to have children in May 2007. We got pregnant in October and we were so excited! Unfortunately we found out two days before Christmas that we had miscarried. We were devastated. It was honestly one of the hardest experiences I have ever been through. We decided to try again because our doctor said miscarriages during your first pregnancy is very common. We got pregnant again in June 2009. We both were very skeptical about the pregnancy and didn't want to get too excited because of what happened last time. We found out in August that we miscarried again. This time was not as hard as the first. I think it's because we had already been through the process and knew this was a possibility. At this point we began the discussing the possibility of fertility treatments and testing to find out why we kept having miscarriages. The testing revealed no detectable problems and I went through several months of fertility treatments and medications without any results. We began discussing the possibility of adoption. We both agreed we felt adoption was for us. We researched all the available adoption opprotunities. Private adoption costs ranged from $10,000- $20,000. We then found the SC DSS website and found out that there are over 107,000 children in foster care waiting for homes and there are no charges to adopt. We both felt we would rather give a child in need a good home than pay for a child. In March 2010 we officially expressed interest in adoption with SC DSS. We sent in our primary application and were told we had to attend an adoption orientation class but there was a waiting list. We waited acouple of months and finally got in
. ----see next post for the continuation ------