Recommended Reading for Adoption

We love to read…if you ever visit our home, you would see that we have books everywhere.  And as if we don’t have enough books, we visit our local library weekly for more books!  With that said, we have read quite a few books on adoption in the last few months.  Here are a few that we have found to be helpful:

• The Complete Book of International Adoption by Dawn Davenport
• Successful Adoption: A Guide for Christian Families by Natalie Gillespie
• Becoming a Family: Promoting Healthy Attachments with Your Adopted Child by Lark Eshleman, Ph.D.
• Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections by Jean MacLeod and Sheena Macrae

Let us know if you have any book recommendations.

The Great Paperchase

Let me share with you a little of what we have done so far in our adoption. . .

• We spent several months researching countries, adoption agencies and talking to others who have adopted to learn about their experiences.  We know a lot more about world geography now! 
• We chose to work with Families for Children adoption agency in Utah.  This agency has a great deal of experience in Taiwan.  We also seriously considered Heartsent Adoptions International in California.  We submitted our application to FFC along with photopages of our family and a letter of introduction which will be sent to the orphanage in Taiwan. 
• In order to adopt, families must undergo a home study by a social worker licensed in their state.  The home study involves several interviews, quite a bit of paperwork and a visit to our home.  The social worker is responsible for evaluating our ability to parent, our home life, the state of our marriage, our background, our health, basically everything.  We selected Jewish Family Services to conduct our home study.  We have one more meeting with our social worker next week, then we will be awaiting our home study report.
• We are also in the process of collecting the paperwork for our dossier.  The dossier is a set of legal documents required by the foreign government.  Our dossier includes forms from our doctors stating that we are in good health, verification of our employment and finances, a copy of our passports, criminal background checks, our birth certificates, and our marriage certificate.  By the time our dossier is complete, it will also include our home study report and approval from the U.S. Government to adopt.  All of these forms will be translated into Mandarin Chinese by our adoption agency, then sent to Taiwan.

Whew. . .it’s amazing what must be done in order to adopt! 

Welcome to our blog!

This is our first post - we are adopting a child from Taiwan and thought we would keep everyone posted on our journey through this blog.  Stay tuned for more info. . .and thanks for visiting!