what agency? what country?

at that time, we had three friends that we knew that had adopted children. two of those were international and one was domestic. so, we talked with them to see what agencies they had used. then we looked to see what countries the agencies worked with. from there, we narrowed it down to bethany here in atlanta. they were local, well reputed and were working in asia.

i went to a meeting at bethany here in atlanta and learned a ton about international adoption. funny side story, as i was walking into the meeting the strap on my flip flops broke off. nothing like feeling like a fish out of water (everyone was there with their spouse, and jon was home with the girls) with the addition of hobbling around trying to keep my flip flop somewhat connected to my foot! so anyway, i took the info home to jon. one of the great things that we gained from that meeting was that they had a detailed list of the countries' requirements. we were able to look at our requirements (we weren't able to leave the country for months at a time with jon's job and our small kiddos) and their requirements (at that time china required for you to make a base salary of $30k plus $10k for each child you had in your family plus the one you were adopting). by simply looking at those things, we were able to narrow the field significantly.

the philippines. it fit what we were looking for. the wait time for a child would coincide perfectly when jon would be finishing up school. it was one of the cheapest countries to work with. they had children to adopt that were ages 2-3 which was fine with us. we were fine with not having a baby (funny to look at now!) all of it seemed to make sense. and so we moved forward.

bethany looked good. the philippines looked good. we moved forward in faith trusting that the Lord knew the child he had for us and would get us where we needed to be when we needed to be there.

oh, and by this time it was september or october. narrowing these things down didn't take five minutes. :)