S to the Power Of Six!!!

Life's a Dance....

You learn as you go. Well, I (we) have learned a lot over the last year by going through the process of adopting Sawyer. Some of it I wish I could forget like a bad dream, but I cherish most of the experiences I (we) have endured to bring Sawyer home. My advise to anyone who is going to adopt a child from a foreign country would be to do your research. Find the agency that best fits your needs. We didn't at first but, let me tell you Small World Adoption Programs http://www.swa.net/, out of Spokane, WA., was AWESOME. Kathy and her staff are very accommodating to the needs of the families. You can call and ask them a question and they will respond to you in a kind and caring manner. We can not say enough good things about this agency. We highly recommend them.

On the other hand, there is an agency in Seattle which is not very caring about there clients. The owner of the company is a jerk. Let's call him Blave. I call it a company and not agency because the owners are only in for the money. I won't mention the companies name, but the following phase has their initial in it: Aardvarks Are Orycteropus afer. They are very rude to you when you call, do not follow through when you ask them a question and they could care less to give their clients any type of updates or helpful information. They also will change their agency rules without notifying their clients. In our case, two days before we were to leave for China, they told us that we would have to pre-pay the post-placement adoption fees before we leave. When we told them we would pay them when we get back, they threatened to call the CCAA and tell them that we were not in good standing with them anymore and would interrupt our adoption of Sawyer. Then they told Shelby to "pull out her little credit card and make the payment."


Blave is the worst of them all. He will tell you one thing to your face then say or do something different on their message board. For instance, he said that he would outline the new waiting child program for their company in a group posting on the Yahoo message board. Instead, he gave a long dissertation about his son and how he was not on the special needs list and blah, blah, blah...Anyway, his posting had nothing to do with the special needs program that they were developing. The posting ended with the phrase "more to come..." Well, the "more to come..." never came. I would not recommend this company to anyone. They are the worst people on earth to deal with when you are adopting from China. They give you absolutely no support and are very unfriendly. When we called to find out if they had faxed our LOI (Letter Of Intent) to China, the person on the other end said, "well, aren't grateful for what we are doing for you?" How unprofessional can they be? Never again.

We will be going through SWA for Sawyer's little brother or sister. Hopefully sometime next summer/fall. Keep watching to find out.