June 2007 - Decided to inquire about adopting from other countries...
June 11-15, 2007 - Began emailing Kids Link and CAFAC asking tons of questions about Dominican Republic and Ethiopia. Found out Dominican program is not open to Canadians right now as they are waiting to see how the first group of families make out with their adoption journeys. We will find out in September if Kids Link is accepting more families. In the meantime, we inquired about the Ethiopian adoption process.
June 15-20 - Called Provincial adoption coordinator, Richie Mayne, to discuss possibilities of domestic adoption and international adoption. We were told it would be about a 4 year wait to adopt a toddler child domestically. Richie also expressed concern about adopting from Ethiopia only because the Province hasn't done adoptions from this country. We are very confident the agencies working on behalf of the children in Ethiopia or Dominican will have the proper paperwork ready for referral.
June 25 - called the 3 social workers in PEI who are able to do homestudies for international adoptions. All 3 were booked until the end of August. This was disappointing but we decided to go ahead and collect all our dossier documents so they would be ready and waiting when a social worker became available.
June 26 - applied for grant from Orphan's Hope.
Update: we heard back on August 2nd from Orphan's Hope and our name was not drawn in July. They will be doing another draw in August but will only be drawing 1 name out of 50 applicants. PRAY!June 27 - we decided on which social worker we would be using for our homestudy. She agreed to update our homestudy from our last adoption rather than start all over again. This is great because it will save a lot of time and also cost a lot less. We are now waiting until August 20th to begin our homestudy meetings.
June 27 - we decided officially to use Kids Link as our adoption agency. We sent off application forms to them!
June 29- July 15 - Began the paperchase for real!
*Got our police checks done (FREE) and fingerprinting done from the RCMP ($60/each)
*Obtained letters of employment from our employers
*Notorized photocopies of necessary documents (birth certificates, marriage license, passports, health cards, driver's licenses)
*Copied proof of home and life insurance
*Wrote our "letter of request to adopt" for Ethiopian and Dominican officials
*Got pictures of our house and family printed
*Notice of Assessments from Revenue Canada
*Asked 4 friends to write letters of reference for us
Luckily, we had many of these from our last adoption so it was just a matter of updating a few items and organizing them all.
July 5 - received our adoption questionairres in the mail - booklets we need to fill out for our social worker on why we want to adopt, challenges in adoption, etc...
Update: Of course, mine is finished and Chris hasn't started his :-(August 6 - meeting with Travel Clinic to talk about vaccinations and medicines. This may sound premature but we may be taking the children with us and we want to be sure they have their needles. Some need to be taken months in advance. I think Chris and I are covered as we did all these for our last adoption trip to China. We may need to get one more for Yellow Fever which is required to travel to Ethiopia.
August 8 - Our medicals will be completed. This is the last bit of paperwork we need to complete our dossier (besides the updated homestudy, of course!)
August 22 - Our first meeting to update our homestudy. We are hoping to have 2 meetings to update our homestudy and then our social worker will get it all together for us to send to the Province for approval!!!! YAY!
August 29 - Our second meeting to update the homestudy. Our social worker is hoping this will be all we need as far as meetings go and then she will take a couple of weeks to write up the homestudy and then on to provincial approval!
