an adoption update of sorts

I haven’t shared anything about our adoption journey since April so I thought today would be a good day for an update -if you can really call it that.

After our last agency ended up having to close their doors on Canadian applicants back in April, Jared and I took some time off from researching anything adoption related, we had just had too many doors closed in our faces and needed a little break.

A couple of weeks ago we decided to start looking once again. Honestly, if we were to wait a few years and try to adopt in the 3-5 year old range things would probably be a little easier but it has become increasingly apparent to us lately that our extremely extroverted little girl would do really well with a little one to play with -sooner being better than later.

One of the big hurdles for us is that we pretty much need to adopt younger than Raeca (the province strongly suggests it, as do most agencies) and she will only turn 3 in October. Another problem we encounter is that because our province doesn’t have any adoption agencies we have to find ones in other provinces (or in the US) that are willing to work with us, greatly narrowing down the options.

Originally we were looking pretty exclusively at Africa but had now decided to look into pretty much all the programs available to us. I thought I would give you a little run down of our process lately.

Kenya – they require a 6-12 month residency as part of the program, that wasn’t a deal breaker for us but then Jared started reading about some negative stories where couples did the residency and then were denied the child’s paperwork at the end. Not a risk we are willing to take right now.

Eastern European countries – they are mostly kids 5+

China – only the “waiting child” (special needs) program is running right now but after talking to an agency it seems like their program is more backlogged than is comfortable right now. This is mostly due to China opening up to other countries and giving the children to citizens in those countries as opposed to Canadians.

Guyana – the agencies website says they have children 2+ available but when I called she said it was more like 3+ and there were currently quite a few couples waiting.

South Africa – this program just recently opened back up and my fear is that it will get bogged down like the rest of them. Plus the agency never called me back when I left a message.

USA – they only do newborn adoptions with Canadians.

There are probably more countries we’ve looked into but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

At this point it is pretty frustrating because in October it will be two years since we started filling out adoption paperwork and we are no farther ahead. It seems as though God has been guiding us to adoption and still is but it is hard when the doors continue to close.

If you are a Canadian and interested in international adoption there is a list of the agencies in Ontario with a good run down of the countries and it is a pretty good starting point, you can view it here. Other than Ontario, BC also has quite a few adoption agencies but most of their programs are only open to BC residents.

Other than researching adoption stuff we’ve also been working on a lot of projects (I’ll be sharing more on that soon!). Currently Jared is working on building a playhouse for Raeca, maybe one day she’ll have a little sibling to share it with.

with love,
Chantel