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.
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WOWZER. That's quite a dilemma!! I hardly know how to offer advice as this isn't even an arena where I know my ass from my elbow. I think it all depends on what your goals are...is the goal to:
a) expand the family?
b) expand the family FROM Ethiopia?
c) something else?
If the goal is to expand exclusively from Ethiopia, and time IS of the essence, then switch to the faster, assuming they're ethical & still doing well by kids, and the cards will fall as they're meant to. If the goal is to expand, but there WHERE is negotiable, could you find an agency that offers a time in between the SHORT (hence vying w/ graduation) and LONG (CHFS), is affordable, meets all your other needs, etc., but might give you other areas from which to consider??
It's hard ~ we're having a very similiar dilemma w/ #2, timing, etc., and as parents, your hearts & minds can say two different things, so we're left in the, "WHICH one do we follow?" I'd love to wait longer, but Scott is in such a hurry, but putting it off longer also has its drawbacks...sometimes, I think we just have to accept that it's NOT in our hands and things will go as they're meant to...perhaps the long times w/ CHFS won't actually be as long as projected...or they will, and you'll be thanking yourselves that you did have time to get things settled post-grad, w/o introducing a whole new person and the challenges that brings...*sigh* Sorry...I'm kind of just free-thinking and typing. Does that even make any sense? ;) Good luck!
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