There are two important aspects of choosing an adoption agency. There is “ethics” and there is “fit”. Both are equally essential to your adoption experience.

Ethics is a big one. All adoption agencies have nice names, pictures of beautiful children on the websites and magazine ads and claim to be in the business to help children and families. The truth is, unfortunately, that adoption is a big business, and any time there is money to be made in a business, you risk unethical people and practices. Adoption is no exception.

All adoptive or perspective adoptive parents owe it not only to themselves, but to adoption in general, to only work with an agency that they know is 100%... more

Ok…new topic to keep my mind busy. :)

I have to say that I have met/run into/heard from/spoken with more than a few adoptive families lately that have realized well into their adoption processes that the agency they chose was not the right or best choice for them. Finding out that the agency you have chosen isn’t a good fit for you for whatever reason AFTER you have given them your hard-earned money and oh so precious paperwork is not a good thing.

I am surprised, considering what a huge decision adoption is, and the great amount of money... more

For those of you adopting internationally, you probably know that one of the most difficult and dreaded aspects of international adoptions is dealing with the USCIS, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

I have already written several posts on “how to” best navigate the necessary steps with immigration for your adoption here, here, here... more

Here are some tips for filing your applications with USCIS.

-File your I600A application as soon as you can. As I said earlier, you may or may not need to wait until your homestudy is complete and you should have a good idea of where you are adopting from, what agency you are using, how many children you are adopting, etc. before you can file. Since some offices take up to several months to process the I600A and since many adoption programs require you have it in hand before submitting your paperwork overseas, you do not want to end up waiting on this... more

The second part of USCIS’s “job” regarding adoptions is the I-600. This is the form that is submitted for a particular child. This is another one page, two-sided form that has general information about the adoptive parents, and it also has detailed information about the child being adopted. There is quite a bit of supporting evidence required, including proof that the child is an orphan, proof of the adoption, a medical exam from a designated doctor including tests for HIV and other communicable diseases, etc. These documents and the medical exam are typically... more

The “job” of USCIS in an international adoption is two-part. They have to approve the parents to be qualified to adopt, and they have to approve the child as being a legal orphan and qualifying for a US visa. There is lots of info on their website regarding who qualifies as a legal orphan, and it is very important that you are working with a trust-worthy agency who can ensure that the child you are adopting, is indeed an orphan, not just in the sense that they are not living with any parents, but in the legal US immigration sense too. In cases where a child... more

I have mentioned USCIS in my posts quite a bit lately, and I thought I would do a series of posts on just what USCIS is, what its role is in adoption and some tips on getting your applications handled as smoothly as possible. These posts will only be relevant to families who are citizens of the US, so I apologize to anyone reading who this doesn’t apply to.

USCIS stands for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. In recent years it has also gone by the acronyms INS, BCIS and possibly another one I am not remembering at the moment. Their... more

Waiting…yuck. Waiting is an inevitable aspect of adoption, and one that is usually fairly stressful for adoptive parents. You wait on agencies to get things done, you wait on education and preparation classes, you wait on paperwork, you wait on government offices, you wait on medical tests, you wait for a referral, you wait for more information, you wait to be united with your child, you wait and wait and wait some more.

Even when everything goes smoothly, you are bound to run into some level of waiting with your adoption, because adoption is a process, which by nature, is... more

In my last post I talked about what a dossier is, what sort of things are required for one, and what you could do to start getting things ready for preparing your dossier for your adoption.

In this post I am going to give you some tips on how to best get through your mountain of paperwork and get that dossier done quickly. Remember, every day those papers sit on your kitchen counter or on your desk, is another day your child won’t be home with you. How’s that for motivation?

After doing this quite a few times, here are my tips…

-Get/make two of everything, even if you don’t... more

If you are new to the adoption world and planning on adopting internationally, you may have wondered what the heck a dossier is. I remember with our first adoption that I had excitedly joined an adoption email group and announced that we had officially started the adoption process by sending in our application to the agency to start our homestudy. I got an email back from another adoptive parent asking if we had sent in our dossier yet and I was thinking, “My what??” Since I had no idea what it was, I was pretty sure I had not sent it in yet.

Your dossier is all of your paperwork... more