Why Adopt?

Most people are curious to know why we decided to adopt our first child, how we found our adoption agency, and why we decide to adopt from Ukraine. Here are the answers to these questions!

Mom and Dad's Feelings

We've been talking about adopting since we first started dating. Kristin said that she wanted to have three children. Lee wasn't comfortable having more than two children because "there are enough people in the world already." Adoption seemed like a natural solution!

Kristin had been thinking about a foreign adoption for a long time, partly because of hearing the stories of friends and family members who had adopted children from China.  She was also influenced by her interest in world travel (including visits to developing nations) and an interest in other cultures.

In any case, adoption (and foreign adoption in particular) was something we'd planned to do ever since we first started talking about building a family together.

We were in our early 30s when we got married, and both of us were ready to have children as soon as possible. (We wanted three children, after all, and didn't relish the idea of having kids still in the house in our 60s!)

After a few years of trying without success, we started talking with doctors and discovered that having birth children of our own might be tricky. We decided that rather than trying for years without any guarantee of having a child, we would instead begin the adoption process so that we would be able to start raising our first child while we negotiated the issues involved in trying to have a birth child. Since we'd always planned to adopt anyway, this seemed to make a lot of sense.

How We Found Finally Family

Finding an adoption agency that's good to work with is a tricky business! There are lots of agencies available, and each one has its own character. The adoption process is not easy, so it's important to find an agency that matches your personality and situation.

We investigated a number of different agencies, getting names from Yahoo! and following up on recommendations from friends and others who'd adopted. We interviewed with one well-established agency here in Chicago, but during our initial discussions we realized that they had very different ideas about adoption than we had. After affirming between ourselves that it really wasn't necessary for us to work with the very first agency we talked to, we decided to trust our instincts and keep looking.  Interviews are important!

Shortly after this, a flier arrived at our church (where Kristin is a pastor) advertising an information session for Finally Family: another Chicago-area adoption agency. Kristin did some research on the Internet, attended the session, and knew right away that this was it. She met our soon-to-be social worker Nicole ("Nikki") Caudel, and really liked her. We decided to visit their offices and get started.

Finally Family is a small agency that's been facilitating adoptions for about ten years. Until recently, the only other country they'd worked with had been Bulgaria, but now they were starting programs with Ukraine and Guatamala, and Nikki was handling their Ukrainian adoptions. Nikki was just finishing up her degree in social work, and we would be among her very first adoption cases ever.

We decided that we liked Finally Family's smallness and Nikki's "first-time" energy. We knew that there would surely be rough spots in process because of their inexperience, but we also were confident that they would be "on our side" and would be highly motivated to make our adoption a success.

In December 2001, we signed the first papers and received our first list of paperwork and procedures to get started with. We were on our way!

How We Chose Ukraine

When Kristin learned about Finally Family, she found that they work with Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Guatamala. We had to choose between these countries, or else find another agency that worked with another country.

Each country has different ways of handling international adoptions. Many countries do not allow them at all. Of those that do, there are a wide variety of practices. In some countries, adoptions can take two years or longer, while in others the period is more like 3-9 months. Some countries use foster families to care for children prior to adoption, and others use orphanages. Some countries require two separate visits by parents during the adoption process, and others only require one. Some countries have very good health records for their children, and others have sketchy ones.

Ukraine had a number of advantages that we really liked. The adoption process typically took about six months, from the first paperwork to the trip home with the baby. Babies are cared for in orphanages, which--although they don't provide as much individual attention to each child--are at least clean, professional places that offer good healthcare. The use of orphanages also provides greater assurance that the children are legitimately available for adoption. Past history shows that Ukraine has a very good record for having accurate medical information about the children available for adoption.

While we were working through this decision, Kristin read a book that described the history of Ukraine. It described how traders and raiders traveled south and east down the Dnipro river from Scandinavia, while Central Europeans traveled east and north. These heritages fought for centuries, but have gradually blended over time. After reading this, we realized that Kristin has a strong Scandinavian heritage, and Lee has a Central European heritage, which seemed to "click" with what we were learning about Ukraine. Taken together with the advantages described earlier, this seemed to us to indicate that Ukraine, somehow, felt right for us.