In the past few weeks I have gotten several emails/comments from readers asking how we came to adopt the children we did and choose the adoption programs that we did. I have written a lot on how to choose the right adoption agency and on transracial adoption options, but today I thought I would share with you the “technical side” or our adoptions, and how we came to make the decisions we did.


I hope that by sharing this, it will help others to find the right paths to building their families through transracial adoption.

Let me start by saying that for me, the “deciding where to adopt from”, once we had already made the decision to adopt, was often difficult. This was especially true with our first adoption.

Josh and I made the decision to adopt for the first time in 2001. At that time we had three biological sons who were 5, 3 and 2 years old, and I could not give birth to any more babies. I desperately wanted a daughter. I knew we were meant to have a daughter. I stumbled onto a web-page about adoption on accident, but once I found it, something inside me “clicked”.

The choices were overwhelming though. After some very limited research I felt pretty discouraged about our chances of adopting a baby domestically, so we turned our full attention to international adoption. International adoption appealed to me at that point and just felt right.

My first logical thought was China, since that was the only adoption program I had heard much about, however I quickly learned that we were too young (and too poor) to adopt from China. The agency I contacted to inquire about China suggested Vietnam as an alternative. After some research into some other countries and even considering a waiting child from Russia, we chose to adopt from Vietnam.

At that point in time we were looking for a program that would allow us to adopt a young baby girl. We were looking for a program that had minimal travel requirements (Vietnam was only requiring a one-week trip when we signed up, although that changed to two trips during our process). We were looking for a program/agency with fees as low as possible, because we were a young family without much (any) extra cash.

We needed a program that would allow us to adopt at our ages (24 an 26), we needed a program that didn’t have high income requirements and we needed a program that would allow a family with three biological children to adopt.

We were open to children of any race. We were not looking for a special needs child.

We almost chose Samoa because it looked really good on paper, but after talking to some other adoptive parents, we became concerned about some of the ethics involved (or not) in the program. Vietnam became the clear, best choice for our family, and we brought our Maggie home at the age of almost four months old, nine months after we started the process.

In my next post, I will write about why we didn’t adopt from Vietnam for our next adoption and how we came to continue to build our family through transracial adoption and why we made the choices we did. First, here are some tips on finding the right adoption program for your family.

- Decide what age and gender child you are hoping for.

- Determine what your “adoption budget” will be, and what you can and cannot afford in regards to adoption fees.

- Determine how long you can manage to travel. Your job, other children in the home and finances are all factors in this one.

- Be honest about race and what you and your family feel comfortable with (or not) in regards to adding a child of another race to your family.

- Take a look at your family and be aware of what requirements you would and would not meet.

- Use all of the above information while researching agencies and programs to determine which are a good fit for your family.

- Talk to other families that have adopted through the programs you are considering so you can get a good feel for how that program is currently moving.

- Remember that things can change quickly in international adoption. When we started on adoption from Vietnam, all was well, things were moving smoothly and there was only one trip required. By the end of our process, there were families stuck in Vietnam indefinitely, unethical behavior was suspected by several agencies (luckily not ours) and two trips were required. If you choose international adoption, you have to be flexible.

Further reading:
Our Journey to Maggie (the full story of our adoption from Vietnam)

International Adoption Blog

Viet Nam adoption blog