Missed Opportunities

I mentioned in the last post that we had an adoption situation drop suddenly in our laps, but were unable to follow through on it; here is the background on that.

Through one of the adoption support groups we've discovered, I received an email detailing an adoption situation that required immediate action. The birthmom was already on the way to the hospital to give birth, and the birthparents wanted the prospective adoptive parents to be at the hospital as the baby was born. Talk about short notice! I'm not sure if this couple decided literally last minute to give their child up for adoption, or if they had a failed placement, but it sure didn't leave much time. At first I was thrilled to think that this might be our child, but as I read further into the email, & discovered just how unprepared we were, I got very discouraged as I realized we would not be the adoptive parents waiting at the hospital, this time. First off, we have not yet completed a homestudy, due to the fact that they are only good for one year. Our thought being that there's no point completeing a homestudy when we know we won't have the money to adopt within that time frame, thereby wasting money that could have been put toward the adoption. This brings us to the second hurdle, money. The adoption costs for this particular case were listed as $33,500...we had approximately $12,500 saved at the time (just a slight gap in the funding there), and I knew there was no way we could bridge that $21,000 gap overnight. It was a bittersweet moment, realizing this was not the situation for us, after all. On the one hand, we wouldn't be able to adopt that baby...but on the other hand, excited to discover that at any moment an adoption situation could just drop in our laps. It really can happen that quickly, if we're prepared. And it brought up an intriguing question...maybe we should go ahead with the homestudy, after all. Since the homestudy takes so long, perhaps it's worth the "maintenance fee" to update it until we adopt. There would still be the gap in funding to come up with last minute, of course, but maybe that would be easier/take less time than waiting on background checks (for example, if we were able to take out a loan). I brought this issue up to an adoption professional, and her suggestion was to just do the background check section of the homestudy for now, since that is the time consuming part; the actual home visit could be completed very quickly. We would still have to update that in a year if we hadn't adopted by then, but the "maintenance fee" wouldn't be as much. Excellent advice, and something we are definitely considering...we'd hate to miss out on another adoption situation because we weren't prepared.