Seasons Change

Fall is coming to central Texas and you can begin to see the changes. The grass is not growing like it was this summer, the trees are starting to change to yellow, the temperatures are starting to cool off to the high 70's, and before you know it daylight savings time will be here and we'll be falling back an hour. Change is inevitable. Sometimes we meet change with opposition and dread and sometimes we greet it with open arms and embrace it. This is one of those times when Randy and I are welcoming change and look forward to what change has in store for us.

A few weeks ago I was reading a fellow bloggers post about changing agencies and getting a referral almost immediately and it made me start to really question our decision to use CHI as our adoption agency. The agency was always very helpful to us, well organized with paperwork, and had a great reputation, but the recent turnover in their agency, lack of reaccredidation, and the increasing wait time for a referral started to send up some red flags. We were kind of naive about IA and thought that every agency had a year long wait time for a referral, but the more I started to look at other agencies the more I realized that we did not need to wait so long. I brought up the idea of switching agencies to Randy and he gave me some good points to ponder, but as I continued to research other agencies, the more it appeared to us that leaving CHI was what we needed to do.

After finding another agency, we made the decision to leave CHI and start fresh with our new agency. We felt it was the best timing for us before we got too far into the process and lost a lot of money. CHI was very understanding and worked with us on refunding all of our money that we had paid up to this point minus the application fee. What a blessing.

Our new agency is very small and has an outstanding reputation. They have their reaccredidation and currently have an extremely short, to no wait time for a referral in the age category that we are looking for. We truly feel like this is where we are supposed to be.

While we were switching agencies we managed to find an independent agency here in town to complete our home study. Our home study is finished and we are just waiting on the written report to come through. They are aware of our push to get it finished as fast as possible and are working to finish the home study as quick as they can. Our I600A will be mailed this week and we were told by an adoptive parent here in our town that used our new agency, that the San Antonio office that we will use got both of their 171H's (they did two separate adoptions) to them in four weeks. Our dossier paperwork should be here in the next couple days and is a very close match to CHI's so we won't have to change a lot of things. We were over half way finished with our dossier paperwork when we were with CHI.

At this point, we are going to get our dossier submitted as quickly as we can and then we should be getting our referral very soon after our dossier is submitted. Things are now happening so quickly that we are almost nervous that we will be ready for a baby by the time it all happens. Somehow I think we'll be able to work that detail out after 7 years of trying to have a child. :)