Big Compliment, Big Decision

Let me start this off by saying that making decisions is tough for me. Mister is not dissimilar in that personality trait, so often, even the simplest decisions make themselves for us. Even picking a restaurant becomes this big, complicated ordeal.

Mister: Are you hungry?

Me: Yes. Let's go out.

Mister: OK. What do you want?

Me: Oh, I don't know. I could have anything - pizza, pasta, sandwich, burger, Mexican. Whatever.

Mister: Well, what do you feel like?

Me: Any of those. How about you?

Mister: Oh, well, any of those are fine.

Then we go on to weigh the specific merits of each pizza place. When we had it last, what kind it was, etc. Then we do the same for each pasta, sandwich, burger, Mexican place. Then usually at this point someone throws in an option that wasn't on the list.

Me: Oh... we could go to the diner too. I haven't had pancakes in a while....

Mister: True. Do you want pancakes? We could go to the diner....

At which point we will add that choice and revisit all the merits of each restaurant we can think of. And each type of food.

Me: Hey, you know it's now 10:00. We should just have cereal I guess.

Mister: Yeah.

This is an exaggeration, but only a little bit. Under the hyperbole is this nugget of truth - decisions are really, really hard for us. The bigger the decision, the harder it is for us to decide.

I wrote a while ago about this decision - basically, our agency said that they're small, their program is small and the vast majority of their domestic placements come from other agencies. They said they'll take us into their program, and they're happy to do so, but people waiting at our agency are waiting a lot longer than at some of the big agencies in the South. So they'd completely understand if we left them for a bigger, faster agency. But if we stay with our agency, we might wait for about 3 years for a match. Apparently New England is not a hotbed of domestic adoptions. Not surprising, I suppose.

Last year, when we chose our agency, we didn't think we'd be doing a domestic adoption. So we didn't pick this agency on the merits of their domestic program. But here we are.

This is where the big compliment comes in. Earlier this week, we submitted a final draft of our profile book to the program manager of the domestic program and to our social worker. Both of them said that the tone of the writing was so warm and perfect from the first page on. The pictures and the layout are both very nice and that we created a great profile. Most importantly, they both thought that because of our great, warm, nicely laid out profile, we would likely be chosen very quickly.

(OMG!!!!!!!!!111111!!!!! Did she really just say that?!?!?!? Our profile is so good that we might be chosen more quickly than the other people who are waiting 3 years?!?!?!?)

So this forces us into a decision. Wait 0-3 years at our agency with an excellent profile or switch agencies and possibly have to redo the profile that took me months to write?

Well, friends, we're out on a limb. We're staying with our small agency and betting on the high quality profile to not make us wait 3 years.

The best news about that decision is that it's not mutually exclusive of another decision. If, in 6 months, our profile has seen no action, we'll start talking with some of the other agencies and figure something out from there. So really, we win. We get to stay with the agency we've been working with, and we don't really have to make any sort of a decision until we feel like it. Now that's my kind of decision!