We Have an Agency!

Anyone that knows me, knows that I am not an impulsive person. Every decision I make has been thought out...pondered on...analyzed...second-guessed...thought out some more...and finally...decided. This can be a good thing, but it also means that decisions don't come easily for me. As was the case with the decision of which agency to use for one of the most important decisions in our lives.

As we started our search, I got the case of the "What ifs"...What if we choose the wrong one? What if another one is less expensive? What if they don't do a good job? What if the process gets drawn out? What if we never get matched? The questions went on and on and kind of paralyzed me in decision-making purgatory. Announcing our decision to adopt, forced me to start looking more closely at agencies in an effort to choose one and move forward. To do this, I started compiling all of the recommendations (and non-recommendations) from family and friends. Being the organized person that I am, I created a spreadsheet with the four agencies I was most interested in across the top and all of the questions I wanted answers to along the side, so I could easily compare agencies. Then I scoured the Internet to find as many answers as possible for each agency. Once that was done, I began calling agencies and talking to a representative to get more answers and to get an overall feel for the agency.

After comparing my spreadsheet, along with my overall impression and some good conversation of what is important to us in an agency, Chris and I finally chose an agency and sent in our application along with half of our homestudy fee. In choosing, we liked a few of the agencies and for different reasons; one had online training sessions which would be much more convenient; another had more of a national reach, whereas another was smaller and might offer more personal attention; all encouraged openness, but some were a little more strict on that than others. In the end, it really came down to the feeling I had when speaking to the representative and an overall peace we had when thinking about using the agency.

We really wanted to get our application in quickly this month because we need to take 12 hours of parenting/adoption training at their facility and our agency only offers it every 3 months, the next session being at the end of this month. We are happy that we were able to enroll in the March training sessions so will be attending that soon. We are also anxiously awaiting the arrival of our homestudy paperwork so we can get started on everything we need to complete in order to become active parents-in-waiting.