Adoption process

There are so many steps to adopt! Below we have listed many of the steps to complete before we bring our children home.

• DONE Choose a homestudy/childfinding agency. We choose separate agencies. Our homestudy agency is HOPE Adoption Services in Oak Park Heights, MN. Our international/child finding agency is WACAP in Seattle, WA.
• DONE Orientation with HOPE.
• DONE TWICE (We got the wrong form the first time around) Write autobiography. This will give our social workers LOTS of background information to use when they write our homestudy.
• DONE Attend required adoptive parenting classes, including: Pre-Adopt, Pre-Foster Parent Training, Multicultural Parenting in a Racist Society, Children's Mental Health Training, Coming Home: Adopting the Older Child. We chose to attend the Empowered to Connect Conference in Denver in April (we highly recommend it for ANYONE who is raising a child from a hard place).
• DONE Meet with social workers to answer questions that they may have about our autobiography.
• DONE Complete the rest of our paperwork for HOPE.
• DONE 7/26/11 Home visit. This is when our social worker visits our home to: look for safety issues (note to self: put batteries in the smoke detectors before she comes), see that there is a dedicated room with a closet for the children when they come home, interview each of us separately to see that we are on the same page, and get the final perameters about the children we are looking for (including age, gender, and #).
• DONE Wait while our social worker writes homestudy document.
• DONE Finish paperwork for WACAP.
• Finish gathering documents for dossier. Our dossier is a set of legal documents that will be sent to Ethiopia to so that we can go to court to be given custody of the children and bring them to the United States with us.
• Wait for a referral of children. Once we have the referral we are not able to share their names our pictures online. This is a rule of the Ethiopian government. Sharing that information could result in our not being able to adopt from Ethiopia at all.
• After accepting our referral we wait again, this time for a court date.
• Travel to Ethiopia for court. During this trip we will travel to the orphanage our children living in. We may have the opportunity to meet living family members. We will go to court where the children will be declared legally ours. This trip will last 5-7 days. At the end of this trip we will need to leave the children in Ethiopia. :(
• Again we wait. This wait will be for our Embassy date. This date, 4-6 weeks after the court date, is when we will return to Ethiopia to get the children to bring them home. At our Embassy appointment we will be given the children's new birth certificates, adoption papers, and passports. We need these documents to bring them into the United States.