FAQ's

Three questions have been at the forefront of late:

1. Why did you chose international adoption over domestic?

2. Why did you chose Russia?

3. How did you find/pick the agency you applied to?

Ah, my friends, gather round the fire and I'll tell you a story. OK, so maybe it's not so much a story as a paragraph answer to each question!

To start: Why did we chose to go international?

For us, domestic adoption, while offering the chance of receiving a newborn or a very young infant, was far too passive for our tastes. With domestic, you put a book together about yourself (and don't think I wasn't sorely tempted to go this route just for the chance to do a Brian and Holly scrapbook galore...I gleefully imagined trips to the scrapbook store and my fingers were almost itching to have an excuse to jump into my supplies!) and then....wait. You wait for someone to pick you. Then, you have to establish a relationship with the birth mother, generally, and wait for her to really pick you. Then you have to establish a deeper relationship with the birthmother, generally, and wait for her to give birth. Then you wait for her to decide she really wants to adopt the baby to you to parent. You get the picture. A, we didn't really groove on the idea of having a tremendously open relationship with a birth family - we want to KNOW this is our child and not be reminded frequently that there's someone else in the picture and 2, we didn't want to be in an open-ended waiting game. With international, though a long process at times, you know each and every milestone and can actually...get ready...cross things off a list (whoohoo, aren't those beautiful words?!) and know what happens next. You still have to wait sometimes, but the defined waiting to us is far more palatable than undefined waiting.

2. Why did we pick Russia?
This whole big wide world has a lot of countries in it, but not all of them are open to international adoption. When you start making a list, it's not a huge one. China and Russia have shared the top international spot recently. China has placed severe restrictions on international adoption (no single people, only those in excellent health with no weight issues (and while I once again have to work on mine I didn't want to have to be doing it for adoption - talk about another stress on top of an already stressful situation), blah, blah, blah. South Korea requires you be married for at least 3 years, meaning we couldn't start their process until October. Guatemala is essentially closed...and we just kept coming back to the idea of Russia. We loved the idea of traveling there (which is good because we'll need to go twice) and it made its way to the top of the list and remained there. Plus, while Russia has a large number of Caucasian infants, there is also a contingent of racially mixed babies - and by racially mixed I mean partially Asian. With Bri's biological heritage, a baby with Asian features would definitely work for us!

3. The agency?

We picked the agency after lots of research, reference checks, BBB checks and word of mouth. We're still waiting to hear if they've accepted us, so keep your fingers crossed. We liked that it had local representation here in KC, that they had full time employees in Russia, that they had a ton of information on their website, that someone I work with used them and highly recommended them and more.

Have more questions? Find your local couple starting the adoption process (aka Brian and Holly) and ask away!