Try 2

We have officially said our fond farewells to CHSFS and are embarking on our journey to Sprout(s) with Holt International. This also necessitated a change of social worker, which was probably a good thing. I called the designated social worker last week, and she came out to the house tonight, met us, took all of our paperwork off our hands, and gave us a reduced fee since we already had so much of the update completed. Please keep your fingers crossed that we will have our homestudy completed lickety-split, that way we can get our dossier submitted and be added to the official waiting list.

Deep Breaths

So here's the skinny: Our oh so on top of things social worker is not going to have our home study update drafted until the first week in October. After that, it will take about 2 weeks to have her boss approve it, at which point it will be sent on to our agency for approval. This should take another 2 to 3 weeks. Then they will send us the packet so we can finish up our dossier. At this rate, we won't get on "the list" until the end of November, beginning of December. On top of that, our agency just raised its expected wait time to 12+ months. The 12 doesn't bother me so much as the "+". I called our representative to ask about our wait, and she said since we "still" hadn't turned in our dossier, we should expect a wait exceeding 12 months. Based on some other comments she made, I was led to believe that our potential wait would be more like 14 - 18 months. That puts us up against court closure for the summer of 2010, and that is really unacceptable to me.

In a lot of ways, a referral in 2010 makes a lot of sense - we would finally know where we were going to live, I would (in theory) be settled into my new job, and we would have had time to find a much bigger home with a yard. The thing is...I'm impatient. I don't want to wait that long for a referral. Even worse, I feel like the Ethiopia program is going to explode and we could potentially be looking at a 24 month wait for referral. Or the program will shut down entirely, and we will be unable to provide Dinkeneh with an Ethiopian sibling. That's even more unacceptable.

What's my point? We are considering switching agencies. This is NOT something I want to do. I love CHSFS. I love their dedication to the children, their ethics, their humanitarian efforts in country, and their DVD lifebook, which is unique in international adoption. However, the fact remains that there are other good agencies out there. They don't have all the bells and whistles that CHSFS provides, but they are still ethical, still doing smaller-scale humanitarian work, still taking great care of their kiddos, but their wait times range from "somewhat" shorter to "holy cow that's unbelievable" shorter. The agency we're considering switching to has an average referral time of 2 - 8 weeks. That's right - weeks, with travel 2 to 4 months after that. This, of course, poses a bit of a problem. I hadn't expected to travel before graduation, and it could make an already tough spring semester even tougher. Not to mention all those other things - city, job, house (bar exam) - will still be up in the air.

So what to do? I have absolutely no idea. Feel free to weigh in.