Janine and John are the parents of beautiful and adorable Isabella, whom they adopted from Guatemala as an infant. This time they are adopting from the U.S. foster care system, and Janine has been kind enough to agree to share her journey with us.

Adoption from foster care....it seems like it wouldn't be so hard because there are so many waiting children right? I mean I heard it was hard but I thought the hard part was the court and legal struggles. Even my adoption savvy self went into this expecting to get the training done, home study done, and then there would be children needing homes ready to be placed with a family like us. Boy was I wrong .Or am I?

Having done an international adoption first I guess I just took for granted that there is a system of steps to follow to bring home children in need. I'm learning the hard way that our foster "adoption" system is VERY broken. There are so many families out here waiting to adopt and there is no effective way to link us to the children...there is no real system. There are so many branches dealing with child services that no one seems to have a clue how to connect it all. Social workers are over run with far more urgent cases than they can handle which leaves no time to move waiting children into adoptive homes or god forbid read home studies. There are state DSS offices that actually place children, but a whole other agency does the training and approval for adoptive families and there is no way to link the two. They throw your home study into the pool of other waiting families on a registry and it pretty much just sits there hoping to get noticed.