Pages

Sunday, February 12, 2012

A Side Step in Our Journey

DSHS finally decided earlier this month that they will not be providing us adoption services and is getting out of the adoption business. The sole focus now is helping to keep children with their families and temporary foster care. Luckily, I had already begun contacting private adoption agencies in Washington. I found three that could provide services to us in our rural county.

I did not think it would be difficult to find an agency, that is not true. One agency limits the available children to Washington and Oregon and we felt that was too restrictive. A second agency does not want to place children over that age of 3 with us because we are untried parents and have had anxiety issues, even though they are resolved. Instead of us choosing an agency, that left us with one agency to decide if they were willing to work with us.

We know transferring our DSHS foster-adopt case to a private agency does not guarantee the agency will approve us for adopting an older child, but Bethany Christian Services is willing to work with us through the process. I have had a peaceful feeling working with their staff and our assigned social worker, even though we have not met. We have just exchanged lots of emails.

We are progressing through applications and sending our DSHS documents to the social worker via email to determine how much of the home study we have to update. We progress through this step and continue along our journey.