The First Step on a Long Road

We took the first step of our adoption adventure yesterday (6 Sep 09) by deciding to adopt from Ethiopia. We'll mail the application in the next few days. I guess the very first step was the AWAA seminar we attended at a local church about a year ago. As we talked about the seminar on the way home, we both realized that Ethiopia had made a significant impression on each of our hearts. As we further explored adoption, we contacted a few couples through the AWAA web site who had adopted from Ethiopia. Their enthusiastic and quick responses were very encouraging.

We are moving to San Diego in April 2010, but we didn't want to wait until we were settled to begin the paper chase on the road to adoption. We fully expect anywhere from 12 to 18 months to go by before we have a child in our home. Tacking on another six months to that did not excite us. I'm sure we'll have to repeat some of the paperwork or maybe a home study, but that is a small price to pay to begin the adoption process now

We worked our way through various challenges to get to this point. Without belaboring the various hurdles on the way to making the decisions to pursue IUI and IVF, we attempted IUI four times. After those unsuccessful attempts, we decided on IVF. We went through one IVF process unsuccessfully in May09, and the results did not lead us to believe that another IVF attempt would yield different results. We then considered adoption. As I said, we didn't stop talking about Ethiopia since we walked out of that AWAA seminar!