A post over on the Transracial blog about the hard parts of adoption got me thinking about the 'hard parts' of adopting from Ethiopia. I wrote awhile back that my husband and I decided to go forward with another adoption sometime later this year. Well, things have changed. We have identified a sibling group in Ethiopia that we are interested in. I’ll share details later after I know for sure that they will be ours. But learning about these children has sent us neck-deep into adoption paperwork again. And today, one short week into the adoption process, I'm already remembering just how hard this adoption wait can be.

Today I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Not with paperwork — I eat paperwork for breakfast — but with waiting for the paperwork to arrive so we can start signing and notarizing and authenticating. I am the worst waiter in the universe and I want to get this show on the road.

Today’s woe? Our local homestudy agency is considering scaling back or possibly even outright eliminating their international homestudy program. They’ve consented to send me a homestudy packet. But best case scenario, we won’t be able to start a homestudy for a couple more weeks, and worst case scenario is that we may soon scrambling for another agency to do our study. To quote a line from the movie The Incredibles, I’m not happy, Bob. Not happy.

You see, this homestudy agency has written us five homestudies over the past decade, none of which took more than six weeks. They are an awesome agency, and I am very much afraid that another agency will not be that fast. And this is a big deal. The dreaded court closure is looming, you see.

If we can pull together our entire dossier by the end of May, we might squeak through court in late July and have kids home by early September. Get the paperwork done by mid to late June, and we’ll have to wait until after the Ethiopian New Year to get through court, which would mean a homecoming of Thanksgiving or later. That’s three months difference. Three months longer in the orphanage. That is huge in my mind.

There is a terrible urgency once you have a picture of a child who is waiting for you on the other side of the world. That is one of the very hardest parts of adoption, in my opinion. Even when your paperwork is complete before you get a referral, the wait is still hard. But doing it like we are doing it—spotting the kids before we’ve started a thing—is probably the hardest way to go.

In the next few days, I’ll be sharing hints on surviving the wait, as well as my handy-dandy checklist for completing the first steps of the paperwork process.