[GCS]

I knew we wanted to adopt two children and that they would likely not be siblings. That being the case, the first thing I did was discuss this with my "short list" of agencies. A few of them would not allow us to adopt two unrelated children, a few of them lied to me and told me that "Russia doesnt allow that". I figured if they were lying to me already I could toss their information now.
So my "short list" went from about 10 to 5. Then I wanted to know how we were paying for everything. Adopting two is a bit pricier, and I did not want to be one of those couples with 10 thousand dollars strapped to varies parts of my body as I traveled, in fear of being mugged. I found agencies where the majority of the monies being paid were written in money orders here in the US. We only traveled with a small amount each trip. Much more to my level of comfort. This narrowed my search again.
So in the end I had 3 agencies. The choice I ultimately made was not so much price (as I thought it would be) but experience. I figured that with 2 children the chances of having a problem were doubled and I wanted someone with lots of experience. I chose the agency that did more adoptions than the others on my list and worked in more regions. We figured anything that came up for us would have likely come up for others before us so they would know what to do.
By the way, there was a big problem between trip 1 and 2 with our daughter's paperwork. It turned out our facilitator had to drive 2+ hours to the small fishing village she was from and have additional paperwork signed off on by the mother. Things could have gone south here, but our facilitator took care of everything and we never knew about it until after our court date. It really went down to the wire on this and we were never the wiser and there was no additional stress! So, in my book, experience counts!
Christina