Our little baby girl was born yesterday.  Mylie is our 7th child and we brought her into our family through adoption.  For long-time shmula readers, you might remember that we just adopted Preston last year.  Yup, we did it again 1 year later, and we’re very, very happy.

The last month has been a humbling experience to spend time with the birth parents.  Building a relationship with them has been great, but an emotional time for our family.  I’m very thankful for them and to them — for the good people that they are and for choosing our family to be the parents of Mylie. 

Here she is — she’s very cute and will probably have a to-die-for Afro Puff:

The Adoption Process

The process is challenging.  Because there is a lot of ourselves invested — in time, money, and emotion — in the process, we’re willing to put-up with things that I normally would not.  This is not surprising; in fact, this is Queueing Psychology at work.  As a reminder, below are the tenets in the Psychology of Waiting Lines:

1. Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time.
2. Process-waits feel longer than in-process waits.
3. Anxiety makes waits seem longer.
4. Uncertain waits seem longer than known, finite waits.
5. Unfair waits are longer than equitable waits.
6. The more valuable the service, the longer the customer is willing to wait.
7. Solo waits feel longer than group waits.

<Go to other Articles on Queueing Theory>

The process itself can clearly be improved.  Below is the process that we went through for both of our adoptions.  Because there is no "adoption" Standard Work, then you will find a lot of variation in the industry and, we all know, that variation from a process perspective isn’t a good thing and leads to an inconsistent and poor customer experience.  Nevertheless, below is our experience — someone smart like Karen, Mark, Ron, Jon, Kevin, Ted and Lee, Mark, or Mike can probably map this quickly and build a culture of improvement around Adoption in general:

• Search for Adoption Agency
  • Download Packet
  • Print Packet
  • Fill-out Packet
  • Mail-in Application

• Submission
  • 3 Reference Letters
  • Fingerprints (6 week wait)
  • Health Assessment for everyone in family
  • Proof of Marriage
  • Employment Check including Financial Health
  • Homestudy (took about 1 month)
  • Family interview
  • 1:1 interviews
  • Agency Write-up

• Approval
  • Agency Committee reviews file
  • Accepted as Adoptive Family
  • Create Profile (parallel process above, 2 weeks)

• Matching
  • Agency calls us to tell us situation & ask permission to show our profile
  • If no, then we continue to wait
  • If yes, then Agency shows our profile to Birth Mother
  • If Birth Mother chooses our profile, then we meet Birth Mother
  • If we like birth mother and she likes us, then we are matched.

• Birth
  • Make arrangements for day of delivery
  • Relinquishment in Utah is 24 hours after delivery
  • After Birth Mother signs relinquishment papers, then Adoptive parents sign documents & pay Agency Fees.
  • Bring baby home.

• Post-Placement
  • 3 post-placement visits by the Agency at 2, 4, 6 months.
  • After last post-placement & 6 months after relinquishment, then can finalize with attorney and judge.

Departing Note

Guy Kawasaki was in Utah last week, but I missed his keynote.  People can say what they wish about Guy, but I like him.  I can’t stand Godin, but I like Guy a lot.  He’s adopted a few kids also and said this — something that I believe is true and important:

You can love an adopted child as much as a biological one. A man’s contribution to a pregnancy lasts about ten seconds — five if he told the truth — three if you asked the mother. And yet I’ve met many men who who were skeptical about adoption because they didn’t think they could “bond” with a child that didn’t have their DNA — ie, the ten-second commitment. This is simply not true: when you hold your precious jewel for the first time, no one cares if none of those chromosomes came from you. Certainly not the baby. Certainly not your wife. So get over it. Your DNA isn’t the Holy Grail — to mix several metaphors.

Totally Unrelated But Still Fun

Please find originally-written articles on Queueing Theory below:

• Queueing Theory: Part 1
• Queueing Theory: Part 2
• Queueing Theory: Part 3
• Queueing Theory: Part 4
• What is Waste?
• On Time-Traps and Waste
• Call Centers as Queueing Systems
• Travel Time & Waste
• Little’s Law for Product Development
• YouTube’s Queueing Properties
• Psychology of Queueing and Disneyland
• Queueing, Disneyland, and FastPass
• Multi-Tasking Leads to Lower Productivity
• Queueing Theory and Terrorism
• On Queueing Theory and Elevator Mirrors
• Queueing Psychology at the Gas Pump
• Psychology of Queueing, Haunted Houses, and Halloween
• The Variability Tree

For a few articles on Operations, lean and six sigma, please visit the links below:

• The Gemba is the Dojo

• Managing Constraints Under Peak Volumes

• Order Pipeline of Events

• On Game Theory

• Series on Queueing Theory

• Applied Regression Analysis

• 5S

• Click-to-Ship Processes

• Kanban Sizing and "Pull"

• Lean at Krispy Kreme

• Theory of Constraints and Camping

• Lean for Software Development

• Don’t Waste the Customer’s Time

• Featuritis and the Focus on the Customer