i just realized that this blog doesn’t have details about some of the decisions we’ve made so far–like the fact that we’re currently pursuing domestic adoption (not international) because we’d like as close to a newborn as we can get and because the idea of having our adoption process halted because some country’s government decides to lock down their borders to adoption seems extremely frustrating.  (not that domestic gov’t roadblocks wouldn’t be frustrating too, but…  i think they’re slightly less likely to just say “there will be no more adoptions coming out of Florida until we can figure out what we want our laws to say.”)  Apparently, if you go the international adoption route, the youngest child you can expect to bring home is about 8 months old.  At this point, I don’t want to miss any of the earliest stages.

Anyway, that got me thinking about all of the other (sometimes awkward) decisions that we, as prospective adoptive parents get to make that biologically built families never have to consider.*

1.  what country (or state) your child will come from.

2.  how old your child will be when they join your family.

3.  what race your child will be.

4.  what health conditions you’re willing to accept (is down’s syndrome okay?  how about cleft palate?  how about babies with cocaine in their system?).

5.  whether you’re willing to accept sibling groups (say, an infant plus a 2-year-old).

6.  what agency (or agencies!) you’re going to work with or whether you’re going to try to pursue independent adoption (i suppose this is SORT OF like choosing a delivery doctor vs. home birth….).

7.  what gender your child will be (granted, i know that biological parents wonder about this, but we could, if we wanted to, actually limit our pool of options to only one gender or the other).

During the process of adoption, you are also asked to spell out things like:

1.  your childcare plan (granted, i’ve been trying to figure this out ever since the “not trying not to” phase, but I know some people don’t worry about this until they actually have their child.  Also, the nice thing about pregnancy is you have SOME idea of your timeline when planning childcare.  Not so much with adoption.)

2.  your discipline strategies (and I’m not certain that “well, we’ll figure it out as we go along.” will cut it)

3.  how (and how soon) you plan to share your child’s adoption story with them

And I haven’t even gotten into all of the “hoops” that we’ll have to jump through.  I’ll save that for another post.  whee!

*earlier this week, I was talking to my sister and, in reference to the onslaught of decision-making, she commiserated by saying, “we can’t even decide whether to get a new battery for the lawn mower or switch to a gas-powered motor!”  I agreed with “we can’t even decide what to have for dinner!”  Although thinking about it now, sometimes the bigger, one-time type decisions (what couch to buy, what city to live in) seem to be easier, more go-with-your-gut types of decisions.  so, hopefully that’s what we’ll be able to do with most of the decisions listed above.  hopefully.