Options

We still haven't made a decision but I have decided to post what options our agency has given us. I emailed our agency to find out about starting a concurrent adoption. Though not impossible she said it is a lot harder.

Instead she suggested that we do a dualing adoption. This is where you submit a dossier for a different country then which ever country has a referral first you take that one and your other dossier is withdrawn. The only extra fees are what it takes to prepare the dossier.

The other countries our agency works with that we qualify for are Russia, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, and an African American Domestic Adoption. We have already eliminated Ethiopia because it is a pioneer program for our agency just like their Vietnam program, and we are just not ready for another pioneer program. I don't think we will do Russia because the program is just starting back up and the children are older than we were hoping for.

The good news is Kazakhstan also allows for adoptions of unrelated children so we would still have a chance of bringing home two children. The difficult part is it requires 6-7 weeks in country or 2 trips and I am nervous about a "blind referral." I also still haven't figured out what the average age at referral is for our agency.

We are also seriously considering an African American Domestic adoption. This was actually our first choice when we started this adoption journey but I felt more comfortable being in a line than waiting to be chosen. I love the fact that we could bring our child home from the hospital, that he/she would be ours from almost the beginning of his/her life. I still don't know if I am strong enough to deal with the possibility that the birth mother could change her mind.

So there you have it. As you can imagine I am a basket case trying to decide what is best for us and our future children.

Scrap booking party

I went to my first scrap booking party Friday night. It was a lot of fun. Everyone shares supplies and ideas. The best part was every time you finish a page you get a small prize provided by the hostess. I did two pages so I got this great eye cream (awesome since I'm not getting any younger) and some adhesives to put pictures in my scrapbooks.

The bad part was I was unable to take my scrap booking stuff. I had planned on coming home after work before going but I didn't make it. So the two pages I did were my friends. It ended up being her youngest daughter's baptism. Her daughter is a student in my classroom and being the youngest her scrapbook has the least amount in it, so that made it ok that I didn't have my own pages to do.

Isn't she precious:

Vaccinations Part 1

Despite all the recent discussion about vaccinations on the yahoo groups and blogs I am actually talking about mine and not our future children. I went in and got my first Hepatitis A shot. Luckily because of my job I had the Hepatitis B series years ago. Mike will be starting his series of Hepatitis shots next week. He unfortunately has to endure both A and B.

In adoption news the wait only seems to be getting longer. Our agency is now thinking it might be April of next year before they get their first referrals and we are not #1 on the list.

The good news is our agency is giving us some options that we are considering. I don't want to say anything more until we make a decision, but I will keep you posted.