It's Official

It must be official... I changed the name of our blog :)

We're going to send in the checks for our homestudy and our first agency fee over the weekend and either today or Monday, we'll officially notify our agency that we're switching to their Vietnam program.

It's obvious that no one is quite sure how the changes mandated by the Korean government are going to affect international adoptions. I've seen a lot of different opinions over the last couple of days. However, two agencies that I respect have both indicated that there will be a slowdown when the changes are implemented in January and that the referrals coming from Korea (at least from Eastern) will have more medical issues that will need to be evaluated. Since we were already looking at a 12-15 month wait after our homestudy was completed, adding additional time isn't appealing to me. Throw in some uncertaintly about how the program will be affected by the changes in Korean policy and I think it's time to move on.

So, I did what I always do. I drove the agency staff crazy with my phone calls and did a ton of internet research. I read the blogs of other folks in the process of adopting from Vietnam. I looked at maps of the country. I checked out the web sites of several hotels and resorts that our agency will be using as lodging for parents who are travelling to pick up their children. Yes, that's right... I said RESORTS. Vietnam has become a tourist destination for Europeans. White sandy beaches, little drinks with umbrellas, tennis courts, and the whole works. Who knew? Well, obviously the Vietnamese and the Europeans knew... but not me!

Adopting from Vietnam will probably move our timeline up a bit (barring unexpected crazy weird things that seem to be normal in international adoption). We'll start our homestudy in August and hopefully have it wrapped up by October. Once our homestudy is approved, we'll have to compile a dossier, which is a bunch of notarized and authenticated documents that will be sent to the Vietnam government. Once that is done, we'll receive a referral. The current wait for a referral is 1-3 months (1 for a boy, 3 for a girl). That wait time will probably increase as other families process their paperwork before we do, so we're guessing at a 6 month wait for referral. Then 3-6 months later, the Vietnam government will issue our travel papers and I'll go spend 2 weeks in Vietnam to pick up our new daughter and make her legally ours. Following this theory, we'll have an addition to our family by Christmas of 2007. I guess we'll wait and see... Vietnam just reopened for international adoptions in January of 2006 so we're expecting some bumps in the road.

But we're getting used to those :)