Face to Face

We just got back from the long drive to Maryland and back. We met with our agency and we have been approved by them as well as our homestudy agency. We have the name of our social worker who will visit our home and write our homestudy. I plan to send the 1600a off tomorrow. I have to write a "dear birth mother" letter and supply pictures of us having fun with our children. In addition, we need copies of birth certificates, marriage certificates, employment letter, biographies for both of us, medical forms and that's about all the paperwork required! Imagine that! Kazakhstan required so much more!

We are really looking forward to a hopefully seamless adoption this time. From meeting with the agency, it seems that best case scenario we will be home with our daughter in 15 months from now and worst case is 18 months.

We learned a lot about the adoption process. Apparently, there is a huge stigma in Korea to have a baby out of wedlock. Most of the relinquished children are not necessarily from poverty. Babies are available for Korean to adopt from newborn to months of age and then they are available for international adoption. Usually the referrals are for 5-6 month old babies. They predict we should get a referral 6-9 months from the time our dossier reaches Korea. We can send our dossier to Korea once we have a completed homestudy and our I171h back from the government. Once we have a referral, we contact a physician to make sure we accept the health conditions. Apparently, we will receive very detailed information on birth parents, reason for adoption, any known health conditions, alcohol use, and monthly medical information from doctors in Korea. After we accept the referral, we have to fill out more government forms and wait for our travel letter to arrive. Then we can leave in a day to a week for Korea! The minimum amount of time we stay in country is 3 days with about a week being the norm. We will have custody of our little girl the night before we fly home. We will visit her at her foster family's home a few times before we gain custody.