The Beginning

In March of 2006, we made the decision to adopt.

After we had seen an adoption special on News Channel 5 plus, we attended an informational meeting at Children's Hope International (CHI). Before attending the meeting, we had been watching a television show named Adoption Stories and had completely decided on adopting from Russia based on some of the stories on the show. It seemed that everyone else in the meeting was adopting from China. A family brought in their daughter that they just came home with from China. She was so adorable, so we changed our minds and decided to adopt from China.

During our home study process, we started hearing that the China adoption process was going to be taking longer and longer. After speaking with CHI about this and discussing other countries, we decided that Vietnam was the best adoption program for us.

Vietnam seems to have more boys than girls. We said either gender was OK with us. After our home study was completed, the wait for the dossier began. The dossier is just a fancy word for a bunch of paperwork about us. Unlike other countries, Vietnam does not want to see any document dated more than six months old. So we were not supposed to start our dossier until CHI told us to.