The Next Three Weeks: Agency Registration & Homestudy

Shortly after signing with our agency we received a package of information. There was a lot of "stuff" to dicipher! After reading through the materials, the first thing on the list was completing all registration fees, forms & letters for our agency - and there were MANY.

I previously mentioned that EAC has an Illinois office. They have their homestudy company EAAC - EuroAsian Adoption Consultants located there. They called us within days of signing with EAC to schedule our homestudy. They also sent a packet of information to us with a list of fees, certified/notarized forms & letters that we'd need to compile. This was a pretty huge list of stuff. We also were required to be fingerprinted for IL DCFS, IL State Police Clearance AND FBI (Immigration) purposes.

As I am a complete and total Type A personality, I simultaneously looked at both lists to see if there might be multiple requests for the same document(s) required. If I could identify them, I could be super-efficient and speed up the overall process. Less waiting, less driving, less aggravation. Oh did I mention that I am also task-oriented?? :)

We got it all done in 3 weeks. Yep - THREE weeks. Signed with EAAC homestudy agency on August 31, 2007. Homestudy completed and notarized September 26, 2007. The few extra days at the end were due to minor errors that needed to be corrected in the draft of the homestudy and waiting for my IL State fingerprinting and DCFS clearance letters to arrive and be put in the file.

A little background information

Michael and I have been married 4.5 years, and we live in the western suburbs of Chicago. We've battled infertility problems since the very beginning of our marriage. Although the doctor had told us we would probably never be able to have our own biological child, in April 2005, we became the proud parents of our darling daughter, Amelia Grace.

Fast forward two years later to 2007. We had been trying to conceive another child since Amelia was 10 months old without success. In 2007, we unfortunately suffered two miscarriages within a four month timeframe. It was shortly afterwards that we decided to consider adoption as a way to expand our family.

After exhaustive and thorough research on the internet, emailing with other adoptive parents and after attending one of their adoption seminars , we decided to sign with an agency - European Adoption Consultants out of Strongsville, Ohio. We decided to use them for several reasons:

• They have an excellent reputation.
• Their Russian program allowed adoption of young infants (9-18 months) and toddlers (18 months - 4 years).
• Their Russian program allowed adoption of two unrelated children.
• Their completion time was relatively quick - 6 to 9 months in most cases.
• They have a local office in Naperville. Plus, we really clicked with their Illinois director, Trish Janosy.

After much discussion, Michael and I decided that we would try to adopt two boys from Russia. So our story begins...