What a heavy heart you must carry w/you!  I am so sorry to hear of your long wait.  Although we too have been blessed w/two (adopted) children, that does not change a mother’s dream of her 3rd child, this I know.  The only suggestion I can make to you would be to possibly sign on w/an agency that does not charge any upfront fees?  Of course, you’d still financially need to complete the adoption upon a match but at least you’d have more than one line in the water so to speak?  We contacted a couple that we got off of this site out of UT, one is “An Act of Love Adoptions” and the other was “Heart to Heart Adoptions”  Although I do not suggest you give up, it may be time to kick it into “high gear” if that is possible for you?  In the meantime, if you need to move overseas, life must go on as we wait.  You just may need to consider traveling back if/when you are matched.  Best of luck and many prayers to you!

while i did not use them as my agency, i did work with the director during a very difficult time and found her to be incredibly compassionate and caring.  i know that she is willing to allow families to be very specific in what they are looking for, which almost always results in longer wait times, as does having other children in the family (esp if those children are bio.)

we were very open as to the types of situations, genders and location of our placements.  i know this helped our wait time as our oldest was “gender unknown” at time of match.

good luck to you!

There are always two sides to every story, as there is to this one.  There are many inaccuracies in Brona’s account of her experience here at A Labor of Love.  First, we are not an agency.  We are an advertising/facilitation service.  I have personally placed over 1,000 babies in adoptive families in my career.  Any adoption professionals can only expose adoptive families to birth mothers.  If, as in this case, the profiles provided to share with birth mothers are not attractive or as nice as the others, they obviously won’t get the consideration by birth mothers.  We were sent a profile with a plain black cover.  The insides were yellowed and pictures fuzzy and birth parents didn’t give them much consideration.  We let them know it wasn’t doing them any favors.  We profiled them verbally, sent their profile to pregnancy centers, did extra advertising for them and then extended their contract, something we were not required to do.  I asked them repeatedly to change up their profile and was always roundly rebuffed.  They stated they lost everything on their computer.  We asked them to take new pictures and we would help. Over a year ago, we offered to do their profile ourselves at no cost to them (at a cost to me).  I didn’t receive pictures to do the profile until last week and today.  TODAY!  AFTER this inaccurate posting was made.  I’m wondering how important this is to her, despite what she says in her errant post.  Others respond very quickly to any requests we make of them, in order to expedite the process.  And she says she is “grateful”?  Where I come from, this isn’t how you treat someone you are grateful to.  Lastly, I don’t know who they are paying, but they certainly didn’t pay us 14K.  We advertise.  We don’t guarantee a birth mother, although advertising generally results in a match and placement.  That’s our job and we did it.  We have continued to do it for over a year longer than we were obliged to. To go on line and trash someone who continues to assist you, present you, and work on your profile long after your contract is fulfilled is shameful and ridiculous.  No good deed goes unpunished.

For anyone out there reading this, there are indeed two sides to every story..
Let me clear up a few inaccuriracies in the above comments.  The owner/director of the adoption agency/facilator, Tina Tyra implied that myself and my husband (because we worked together as a team) were not interested in really pursuing the course of adoption. For someone who is in the business for as long as she, you would expect a sympathtic ear and an understanding of couples going through the process, not so…. She states that we sent ‘a profile book with a black cover, the pictures were fuzzy and the pages yellowed’. Again an inaccuracy, of the ten books I sent to the agency, there was only one that was ‘yellowed and fuzzy looking pictures. I had at that point sent off FIVE BOOKS, asked if they were ok, and then sent off the remaining five.  The last one was a little ‘yellowed’.  For her to imply that we just haphazardly sent off black covered, fuzzy pictures is totally false and misleading.
Again the inaccuracies in her story, we had been with ‘A Labor of Love’ almost 4 YEARS, had sent a bankers cheque for approximately $9600.00 and began the waiting process. Ms. Tyra is indeed accurate that we did not send her agency $14,000 but instead I should have said with all the added expenses of printing, mailing, downloading, homestudies, up dating our profile etc, we had spent well into $16,000 -$17,000, I don’t even want to think how much we had already spent..  Throughout those almost 4 years, I time & time again had to ring, e-mail the agency to ask why we were not getting placed.  I was always told, ‘it takes time’,’ the right baby will come’,’ its the recession’,’ not as many birth mothers’ etc. etc. etc, you get the idea!!  At one point, I suggested to the owner/director, Tina Tyra, that she should consider changing her advertising stragtagy from advertising in the ‘Yellow Pages’ to using perhaps the internet!  Does this sound like a professional person that you would want to do business with, and be under no illusion it is a business….
I could go on and on.
When I did research ‘A Labor of Love’ in California, I began to find couples with similiar situations to ours, i.e. waiting a long time to adopt from this agency. For us that was the beginning of the end.
On one of the sites, I blogged about how we were waiting a long time, the dissapointment in the agency and unsure of where our situatiion was going with the agency.
This is where Tina Tyra of ‘A Labor Of Love’ literally crushed our dreams and hopes of having a baby join our family… She publicly shamed and rediculed me by implying that this whole adoption thing was nothing short of a joke to us!  For her to say that I trashed her is again totally immoral and untrue.  This women is suppose to be a professional and in ‘charge’.  Not only did she rebuff me in public, which I could take, but the way in which she terminated our case was compleately unprofessional, unethicial, disgraceful, disappointing and shameful to all the other adoption agencies that work on behave of their clients. We received no letter, no phone call, no formal termination, just an e-mail stating that I had basically ‘hurt her feelings’ and she had had enough of us.
So No Tina, you did not do your job, you FAILED MISERABLY..
To all out there, I apologise for this long response, I hope it does not come across as bitter or negitive, that is not my intention.
I do not want to hold hate or contempt in my heart, she literally shattered our dream of having a baby join our family.  I have had to tell our parents, friend, teachers, doctors, ( they were all involved in this process) and probably the hardest of all, to tell our two children that there would be no brother or sister to join them, no extra sibling to play with…..
I’ve begun to throw out the baby outfits I saved, the crib and stroller I had stored in the attic, the book of baby names, they are slowly going to a new home with someone else.. So yes there are always two sides to every story, for us it ended a story that I hoped I would be able to write about for a long time with my family… but alas that’s not how it ended…