Adoption #2 - The Process

As Andy noted in his latest post, we have officially submitted our application to our adoption agency (OA&FS)!  Over the past few weeks and months, our blog has been rather quiet.  Dominic has kept us busy and in effect, our adoption blog didn't have any adoption-related things to post about.  However, now that we are back in the middle of the adoption process again we'll have lots of fun things to post about in the coming weeks.  Being the engineer that I am, I tend to like lists and schedules which means I'm going to use this post to outline as a refresher on the adoption process.  If you have any questions about our process or are potentially interested in an adoption with OA&FS, this post is a great starting point!

Adoption Process
This time around, getting the process started has been rather easy as we're veterans.  We've already picked our agency and completed our application paperwork which we started back in November.  So what's next?  Officially, our agency has a list on the Steps to Adopt on their website which shows a summary of steps from the beginning all the way through legal finalization.  The last time through, we put together our own list which was similar but had more detail on the early portion of the process:

• Information Meeting
• Pre-Adoption Seminar
• Application Submission
• Application & Intake Interview
• Homestudy Interview #1
• Homestudy Interview #2
• Homestudy Interview #3
• Homestudy Interview #4
• Homestudy Completion
• Pool Entry
• Waiting in the Pool
• Chosen by Birthfamily

Out of these steps, we're already pretty far along!  This is because we have already completed one adoption with OA&FS which gives us a bit of a head start.  Back in February of 2012, we attended the Pre-Adoption Seminar for our first adoption.  That seminar can continue to satisfy a few adoption requirements for several months to come, so we don't have to redo the full 2-day seminar (woo!). 

Looking ahead, we won't have anything else that we can jump past.  There will be meetings, papers to fill out, and plenty of other baby prep to do.  Last time when we blazed through the process to get into the waiting pool, it took about 6 months.  This time around, we started in November, and might target getting into the waiting pool before summer starts.  Speaking of the waiting pool, we had a series of posts last time around that tracked some basic statistics.  For those of you that enjoyed those posts, we'll be doing the same thing this time around too in the near future!