FiveManns.net

Our boys at referral - Q2 2008

In fall 2007 we decided to expand our family through international adoption. After researching various adoption agencies, we settled on Holt International, known for its integrity, and focus on keeping the best interests of children and all involved in mind. We decided to adopt from Vietnam.

In order to qualify, we had only a few days – we needed to submit our application with lots of detailed information before Wallace’s early January birthday. This task got extra daunting after a strong storm knocked out power lines and caused a major outage in our area. After taking refuge with all our office equipment in a hotel, we finally submitted our application on January 8, 2008.

We hoped to have two children between 0-2 years, so in our adoption application we said we would love getting a referral of twins – we thought they would have an easier time adjusting, and would enjoy having a sibling. Holt told us that a case of multiples in Vietnam is very rare, and that we were looking at a wait of at least two years since approval of our home study before we would get a referral.

Lots of complex paperwork and two adoption classes later, we were visited, interviewed and approved by Holt’s social worker for our area. This was followed by an array of additional fingerprinting, background checks and paperwork that needed to be filled out, notarized, county certified, and state certified. We were told that the Vietnam program might close soon due to expiration of inter-governmental agreement. We were advised to create our dossier right away and speed up the process as much as possible. In order to save time, we ended up hand-delivering all documents from office to office.

Then, on June 12, 2008, less than 3 months after our home study approval, we got a surprise call from our social worker: “You said you would accept twins. How about triplets? Three 14-month-old boys?”  We asked for a photo … and the rest was history, It was a love at first sight.