It's been quiet on the blog front for a couple of weeks. There are two reasons for that.
First, I was at a conference in Washington DC last week for work. It was a great experience (though I'm not sure that John is eager to repeat solo daddy duty -- with a croupy kid, no less -- any time in the near future) but that put adoption conversations on hold. And oh, what conversations we've been having.
That's the second reason for the lack of posts. We received some news that has us reconsidering our agency yet again.
We were feeling quite confident that we were ready to make a decision when I posed what seemed like a minor question to both agencies. "What would happen if we were to get pregnant during the adoption process?"
The answers we received put us into a momentary tailspin as we tried to determine our best path forward. Both agencies have policies about the length of time required between children's entrance into the home -- whether biological or adopted. We completely understand and agree with those guidelines. We agree that it's important for each child to have some time as the only new child, and for the family to be able to bond together and adjust to the new dynamics in the household. This is important for a biological child, but probably even more important for an adopted child who is also having to adjust to a whole new world.
The difference came with the policies regarding what actually happens to an in-process adoption if we were to become pregnant in the middle of it. With one agency, the whole thing is called off and you lose any money you've invested. They strongly believe that you should pursue only one means of expanding your family at a time. That's all well and good, except for the fact that 1) adoption is not cheap, so we're not talking about a small sum of money on the line and 2) we're not in our twenties, so putting an absolute halt to any chance of biological children (i.e., actively preventing conception) is kind of a scary thing to contemplate, even if it's just for a year or two.
The other agency's policy is more flexible. Should we become pregnant in the middle of an adoption, we'd have to pause everything. Any money that wasn't going toward specifics of the current adoption (like the application fee and the agency fee) would be applied toward an adoption in the future. Any money that was specifically for THIS adoption (like the home study fee) we'd probably have to pay again later when we re-started the process.
So now we're talking some more. This also brought up the question of whether we should just commit to only adding adopted children to our family. We do feel called to help a child or children who needs us. Are we being selfish for choosing to leave the biological option open instead of committing 100% to the adoption process? These are the things we're discussing.
In some ways, this is coming up because we're not the typical adoptive couple. Most other adoptive couples fall into one of two categories. Either they are infertile and thus pursuing adoption as their only means of having children, or they have children of their own but are past the point in their lives when they want to add further biological children to their family. We don't fit either profile. But really, if you know us, who would ever consider us normal anyway?:)
So that's the update. It's hard to make decisions when it feels like there's so much at stake.
