Domestic Adoption

Building a Family

By Michele St. Martin

Tami and Kris Davis chose domestic adoption because they wanted a newborn child. Tami felt that the approval process, culminating in a homestudy (a report written by a social worker after obtaining references, background checks, medical information and asking probing questions of the prospective adoptive parents) had something in common with infertility treatment. "While I felt hopeful about adoption during the process of getting our homestudy completed and attending the required classes, I also felt like we were under the microscope again, only this time in a different way," says Tami. "Homestudies are very thorough, and I found it to be somewhat intrusive."

Tami adds, "We were very lucky – we adopted in a year, but really the wait was less than three months after we finished our homestudy." Tami and Kris worked with an adoption agency and were chosen by birth parents less than two weeks before the baby was born. Their son Alex, who is now 14 months old, was placed with them when he was 1 day old.

"I never thought about international adoption," Chase says. "We have a number of friends who've adopted internationally, and the children always were babies or toddlers when they came home. That's what stuck in my mind about international adoption." (Editor's note: International adoption of older or special needs children is fairly common.) Sara also had compelling reasons to adopt locally. "My sister is a social worker for a local county's public adoption program," she says. "It felt so natural to go to Jenny and ask her to get us started. I already knew that in these kind of adoptions, single parents were accepted."

Want to see more?

• The End of the Road: Letting Go of Biological Parenthood
• Who Are All These People? Your Guide to Who's Who During Adoption
• Waiting Children: Foster Care and Adoption Basics
• Check out our Article Library.
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