Changing Direction

As we began our adoption journey we have always been interested in adopting a child with special needs. This past month we decided it was time to submit the required paperwork to adopt a child with special needs or as our agency more fondly calls it, Children of Promise (COP). Of course this begs the questions of why we decided to go down this path, what special needs are we considering, and how does this affect the timeline? We'll do our best to answer all these questions in this post.

As our boys grown older we feel our hearts have been led down the path to adopting a child with special placement needs. With so many resources available to us because of where we live and what Beth does for a living, we feel we're in position to offer a child with special needs a home and environment where all their needs can be properly addressed and they can be loved and supported. We also feel that it is selfish for us to wait and wait for a "non-special needs" child when there are so many COP's out there waiting to be adopted. We're in a position to offer them so much.

However, being that we already have 2 children (with their own issues) we realize there are limitations as to how much we can take on. For that reason, we are only able to consider children with minor physical conditions. This would include such conditions as a minor heart condition, extra or missing digits, or asthma to name a few. We also want to ensure that our daughter (we still only want a girl) is at least one grade level behind our youngest so we are only considering girls born after September 1, 2008.

What does this mean for our wait? Matching children with special needs is done a little differently than for non special needs. The actual matching is done by the adoption agency rather than the CCAA and the primary thing they look at what family is the best fit for a particular child. The main difference is that while the LID is taken into consideration it is not the most important factor so families can jump ahead of other families if they are a better match for that child. What this means for us is that the wait could be considerably shorter although not necessarily so. We could still get matched with a non special needs child if our turn comes up on that list before we are matched from the COP list. However, with what's been going on, this is highely unlikely.

As for the updates, we will continue to provide them but bear in mind they are for the non special needs list. We have no way of projecting a wait for the COP list.

Now for the update.

As of 1/13 here's our "non special needs" wait statistics:


Referred through: 4/3/2006

Current wait: 45 months

Projected referral date: 2/13/2013

Projected months remaining to referral: 37




Remember, these are simple projections based on extrapolating the current wait forward. Check out the Rumor Queen (link at top) for more thorough projections