March 28, 2007 Post - Working on Internation Adoption Paperwork

We always said we wanted to have three or four children – definitely not an only child, and even before Kaylen’s adoption was finalized, we had talked about adopting a little brother and/or sister for her. After things slowed down a bit for us – following the adoption, the holidays, and Kaylen’s 4th birthday in late January, we again started considering adopting from Haiti, and officially decided to go forward with these plans on March 3, 2007. We're hoping to adopt two children at the same time, both younger than Kaylen, but are not sure on ages yet. That will depend on the children available at the time we send our dossier to Haiti. We decided to go with the independent adoption route with a facilitatorThis would mean a lot of work collecting documents ourselves, but we're up for the challenge.

Lisa immediately sent a few emails and started working on some research. She sent an email that evening to the director, who emailed back some instruction documents within just a few minutes – on a Saturday night! Well, Lisa is a cautious planner, so while studying the instructions, taking notes, and jotting down questions, but before proceeding, she put out some messages on some web forums to get recommendations (not asking anything about this particular orphanage/facilitator), and did get a couple for them, and also some positive comments in general about how adopting indpendently can save you a lot of time and money because some agencies charge a very outrageous amounts for some of the processing that we would have to do a lot of ourselves anyway. So we’d been confirmed that this was truly the direction we felt we should be going.

So, we moved forward and started preparing our dossier. This is basically our entire file of documents that we’re gathering that will go to Haiti to be processed through their social services and adoption systems. We’ve heard that it takes most people 3-5 months to complete their dossier. We are aiming for the short end of this range, and maybe even two months, if possible – we will see how things go.