Exploring options

Well I emailed Cathy at http://www.adoptionconsultantsinc.com/. In 2004 we had it narrowed down to two options and this was the other one besides Lifetime. The other ladies who picked Adoption Consultants all got matched very quickly whereas Kelli and I (who both picked Lifetime) are still waiting for a match (Kelli is on her first contract extension). Cathy has a program where you pay $300 for the year to be shown when the birthmother doesn't pick any of her contracted families (she contracts with a maximum of 25 families at any given time and of course not every family will be a possible match with every birthmother based on what the family is wanting and also what the birthmother is wanting). We paid Mark Miller $200 to be shown twice so it doesn't seem crazy to spend $300 to be shown as many times as that situation might arise in a year. OR we could paid $4,900 for a 2.5 year contract and if matched then we pay the other $4,900 (same fee of $9,800 we paid Lifetime in Dec 2004). So I emailed her and asked her some questions.

Also, I emailed two ladies at church whose husbands are doctors to see if they have any suggestions of who might be able to help us with our medical forms (prior to October!) for Ukraine. A huge percentage of the people at my church are doctors or nurses etc as the biggest employer by FAR in that town is a large hospital.

And I am thinking of calling the RE's office to get the nitty gritty on the ivf option. I had said in March that if something didn't happen with Ukraine or Lifetime by early July that we would reconsider IVF, so that's what we're doing. Again. Paul has always been strongly in favor of it. I am earning more money this summer and fall than expected so maybe these extra funds could be spent on ivf and if it didn't work it wouldn't be dipping into our adoption fund. That had been my fear in the past that we'd spend thousands on ivf and if it didn't work we couldn't afford to adopt, but given this extra income I think we could afford both.

So anyhow please pray for us to have wisdom what to do. We are still waiting to hear back from Lifetime of course and that will influence our decisions. I think the one lesson I have learned is to pursue TWO things at once. That is the mistake we made with Lifetime. We put all our eggs in that basket until Nov 2006 when we started working with another adoption lawyer (in FL) and also with Ukraine in Dec 2006. Well I take that back, we did four more rounds of inj/iui while contracted with Lifetime so I guess we were still pursuing more than one thing at least some of the time (last fertility cycle was July 2006). Anyhow we are trying to decide which TWO options to pursue right now of the following three: domestic adoption (Lifetime or maybe switch to Adoption Consultants?), IVF, and Ukraine dossier #2.