Adoption plans

Sorry to leave you hanging with that last post.

We are nowhere near decided what or when we are going to do anything.  We are looking at the pros and cons of all the different options out there for adoption.

We have an appointment with a local agency on Monday to see what their process is.  I am leaning towards this one right now.  That option would cost us around $25,000 total.

I am meeting with a friend who adopted internationally next weekend.  I specifically want to talk fundraising with her.  International adoption also interests me, but the cost and travel requirements make me hesitate a bit.  Both of us work and we don't have unlimited time off.  Some countries require multiple trips before you can bring a child home.  We would have to figure out how we could do that.  There is an international agency in town that I plan on scheduling a meeting with.

We are going to set up a meeting with Catholic Family Services.  They have a sliding fee scale where the top fee you would pay to them is $10,000.  I'm pretty sure we would have attorney fees on top of that.  It would probably still be cheaper than the first agency I mentioned.

Another option is to adopt through the state.  Alabama does not require you to be a foster parent before adoption.  Perk with adopting through the state: absolutely free (besides attorney fees I think).  They do your homestudy and 10 weeks of training classes absolutely free.  The only condition is that you agree for the first six months after your training that you only adopt a child from the state of Alabama.  No problem.  The only thing is we would be getting an older child.

We spent a good couple of days discussing this pretty intensely.  It got heated a few times.  Coincidentally we had a counseling appointment yesterday and were able to talk through some things.  Of course I bawled throughout the whole meeting.  The Lex.a.pro is definitely out of my system!  After our counseling session yesterday we agreed to give the adoption talk a rest for a few days because it was stressing both of us out.

Money is the main issue.  It's expensive.  Prohibitively expensive.  I've been brainstorming some ideas for fundraising.  I need to do some research though.  I'm not sure what all of the laws are around fundraising.  I need to figure out if we would have to pay taxes on that money.  Also, I think that raffles are considered gambling in Alabama, so you have to have some creative solutions to that (I thought of getting donations and people could get chances to win when they donated to our adoption fund).  I played around with some knitting last night and I think I've found something that I could easily knit and sell.  I'll post a picture when I have a finished product.

So that's that.  Agency meeting on Monday.  That's the only concrete thing right now. Does anyone have $25,000 laying around that they want to give to us??? :)