A Bicycle Built for Three

Recently we've been toying with joining a new matching website.  It's a fairly new platform, but we've appreciated the care and support shown to expectant mothers -- it's not just about making the match to them.  Our only hesitation was price.  It certainly costs significantly less than joining the agencies, but it's still a monthly fee we hadn't counted on.  However, Husband was recently offered a temporary job with the army that, if all goes to plan, would offer an excellent financial boost; however, it will also mean that he will work out of town four days a week.  It's a routine we've done before, so we see it as a positive thing.  So tonight, brimming with optimism, we decided to go for it with the matching site and entered our payment information... ...and just as the transaction was complete we received an email from our first agency.  A situation has presented itself, and in an unusual move it has been shared with all of the waiting families....

All of our paperwork from our first agency made it safely to the second agency, and it all looks good!  We are officially live! https://www.agiftofhopeadoptions.com/waiting-family-profiles/tommeredith

I was searching online for information about adoption -- my eternal hobby, it seems -- and stumbled across an agency about three hours from here, located in a town I lived in for 10 years.  I don't know why that agency never popped up on my radar before, but somehow here it was.  The reviews seemed quite positive, and there didn't seem to be too many waiting families on their website.  I sent away for some information and got a response rather quickly. We set up a Zoom to meet with the agency director and were pleased with what we heard.  This new agency does things a bit differently than our current agency, which is to be expected.  The biggest difference is an initial large fee that represents a third of the agency's costs; unlike our current agency, we would be entered in a two-year contract with the option to extend only if we don't match through no fault of our own.  The time frame, explained the director, was the result of other families claiming to b...