They Had a Bad Experience With Another Agency. Five Hours Later, They Were Chosen. The Next Day, They Had a Baby.

Choosing an adoption agency looks, at first, like a decision you can make on paper. You compare the wait times, the costs, the reach, and the promises about how quickly they will match you with a birth family.

But there is one thing none of those numbers can show you, and it turns out to be the thing that matters most: whether you can trust the people on the other side to guide and support you through the most personal decision of your life.

This is the story of Richard and Christa, who learned that the hard way, and of the boutique adoption agency that gave them what a large national agency couldn’t.

Richard and Christa began working through that decision in early 2023. After trying to become pregnant naturally, the couple had turned to adoption to complete their family.

That is when they first met Steffany Aye, founder of the boutique agency Adoption & Beyond.

Their choice had come down to Steffany’s agency or a large national agency. Like many hopeful parents, they had come to adoption later in life, and they chose the large agency because of its promise of a wider reach and a shorter wait time before being matched.

They quickly ran into what no adoptive parent escapes, whichever route they take: the mountains of paperwork. Forms to fill, applications to complete, personal profiles and family history to write, print, sign, and post back.

“We joke that we both got part-time jobs because of this. There was always work for us to do for adoption after work.” – Richard

But they persevered, completed all the necessary steps, and in June 2023 their adoption profile went live.

Their agency had warned them what came next.

After the frenzy of activity and the excitement of seeing their profile live came the inevitable anticlimax, as they settled into the reality of adoption: weeks that turned into many months of anxious waiting.

Jumping for the phone every time it rang. Paranoia setting in whenever they had no cell coverage. Questioning every missed call from an unknown caller who didn’t leave a voicemail.

But what the couple didn’t expect was how long they would be left trying to get on with their day to day lives.

Over a year.

“[The wait] was hard. Yeah. It was, it was very, very hard, but I think the desire to become parents overrode all of that.” – Christa

Richard found his own ways to cope. He started seeing a therapist, and he journaled, often and at length, about what they were living through.

One day at work, as he was leaving a meeting and talking about the adoption, a colleague happened to be passing by, overheard him, and stopped.

Rather than carry on to wherever he was headed, he waited and fell into step with Richard on the way to his next meeting.

He confided how he and his wife had adopted their two children, and that it had been one of the hardest, most painful things they had ever done. But it had worked out. Richard just needed to give it time. And he was there for Richard, whatever he needed.

It was one of many such moments, and it stayed with him.

“Family, friends, and complete strangers made the difficult moments easier and the good moments infinitely better.” – Richard

The call eventually came in August 2024 to say they had been matched with a birth mom, 14 long months after their profile went live.

They were, as you can imagine, thrilled, as were their extended family when they shared the happy news. They were finally moving toward being a family of three.

Yet it was not to be. While at the hospital, shortly after her baby was born, the birth mom chose to parent.

“When she changed her mind, I think it was just shock and, you know, utter disappointment, but also this feeling that I wasn’t angry at her. I think it was like the true epitome of two things can be true at once. You can honor and understand her decision [to parent], but then we can also recognize the real pain we were going through.” – Christa

But there was no time to grieve. With the birth mom’s decision, Richard and Christa had to pick themselves up and start over.

Their profile went back into the pool of hundreds of hopeful adoptive parents that the national agency works with, and the waiting began again. Only now with a fresh wound and a little less of the hope and positivity they had set out with.

A second call came in February 2025, almost two years after signing on with their agency. Another match, another birth mom to build a relationship with, and another chance to picture the family they had been dreaming of.

But after what they had been through, they were a little more guarded this time, and didn’t share the news with others.

Sadly, it ended the same way, with the birth mom choosing to raise her child just two weeks after matching with Richard and Christa.

Reeling, the couple turned to their adoption specialist for some reassurance and advice on what to do next.

“You’re back to square one. You might wait a day, you might wait five years. There’s really no way of knowing.” – Their adoption specialist

Christa asked whether, after two failed adoption matches, they might be prioritized in some way, or whether they would simply go to the back of the queue.

And what happened next left them speechless.

“I’ve had families where the child has died in birth. Should we put them above you?” – Their adoption specialist

For a couple still grieving two failed adoption matches, this lack of empathy cut deep.

“It moved into being very hurt, shocked, and then just very upset with the way that we were being treated. A couple who was grieving this loss of a second chance of happiness. Richard is a very level-headed person and doesn’t get angry very often, but he was very much ‘this is ridiculous, the way you’re treating us.’ We just ended up feeling like we were paying a marketing agency instead of an adoption agency.” – Christa

This one experience does not make national agencies a bad choice.

They are large organizations, staffed with caring professionals who have helped thousands of families adopt. But scale comes with trade-offs. When you are working with hundreds of families at once, it is difficult for adoption specialists to truly know any single person, or to understand each family’s experience.

And for Richard and Christa, the trust they had placed in their agency had broken down.

During a walk in their local park to clear their heads, the couple reached a decision.

“After everything that’s happened, I just don’t have any confidence in them. We can either start working with Steffany now or we can start working with her in six months, because [otherwise] I don’t think this is going to happen.” – Richard

So they got back in touch with Steffany to ask for more information about working with Adoption & Beyond, and Richard booked a call.

When Richard had arranged the call, he forgot Steffany’s stipulation that Christa needed to be there, too. When a couple adopts, Steffany needs to be confident that both partners are committed to working through the process together. By the book, that meant canceling their call and rebooking when they could align schedules once more, potentially delaying progress for weeks, all because of a simple scheduling mix-up.

But Steffany remembered them, and once she heard everything they had been through since, she knew all she needed to know about how committed they were to getting their adoption journey back on track.

So instead of sending them away, she called Richard straight back and picked up where they had left off.

It was a small gesture, a compromise, but it was the first time in a long while that they felt like individuals rather than a case number.

Then Steffany did something no one else had. She told them plainly that she couldn’t promise them a match, and that another failure was possible, even now.

What they had wanted was someone to promise them a happy outcome.

What they needed was someone honest enough to tell them the truth, and kind enough to tell it gently.

After two years of confident promises that had come to nothing, Steffany’s honesty was the most reassuring thing they had heard.

Then came the advice that sounded, at first, like the strangest thing a business could say to a paying client.

“Don’t put all your eggs in my basket.” – Steffany

She asked them to sign on not just with her, but with at least two other adoption providers alongside her, such as an adoption attorney and a networking service that connects expectant moms with waiting families.

Each one has its own contacts and its own reach, so working with three organizations means three separate networks showing your profile to potential birth moms, rather than just one.

Steffany calls it the Multi-Matching Methodology.

The priority, after all, is for a child to find a loving home, not who makes the match.

After already paying a large national agency thousands of dollars, Richard and Christa might have been hesitant about adding two more professionals into the mix, but they were pragmatic.

“The only pushback we may have had in our minds was, we’ve just spent a… and you can quote me on this, s**t ton of money with another agency. But even working with the Multi-Matching Methodology, it came out less than we spent all-in with the national agency. And it just felt like Steffany was being honest about what she could and couldn’t do.”

– Christa

This time, there was no mountain of paper to contend with. Almost everything happened through a simple online portal.

Tick, sign, send.

Even when multiple people needed multiple copies, it was all in the click of a button.

“How easy she makes the process, despite how small she is, versus how cumbersome our first agency made it, despite how large they were.”
– Richard

Once the process was completed, Steffany published their profile the same day, on an instinct she couldn’t fully explain. Something just told her to put them out there now.

That same evening, around 9 p.m., the couple were at home, doing nothing in particular, when Richard’s phone rang. A Kansas area code, and Richard, assuming it was someone trying to sell him something, almost let it ring out. But again, instinct insisted, and he picked up.

It wasn’t a sales call. It was Steffany. A baby boy had been born that morning, and they had been chosen.

After more than two years, two heartbreaks, and being told they might wait years more, it had happened in less than a day.

What they didn’t know, sitting stunned on their sofa, was that this moment had been months in the making.

Weeks earlier, a pregnant woman had come to Steffany, worried. She was planning a private adoption with a family in another state, but something didn’t feel right, and no one was helping her arrange an attorney of her own. Steffany pointed her toward one, and wished her well.

Then her baby arrived, and in the hours that followed, everything unraveled. The family she had planned to place with hadn’t even completed their adoptive home study.

Frightened and unsure, she thought of the one person who had helped her when she had no reason to expect it. She called Steffany.

Steffany talked her through the paperwork, and pointed her toward the adoption profiles on the Adoption & Beyond website, and one stood out.

A profile that had gone live only hours before.

“[She told us that] because of the way Steffany treated her, she said, well, I want to move forward with one of your families. And she picked us.”
– Christa

And Richard and Christa are the first to admit there was something almost uncanny about how it all came together.

“There was something cosmic about this.”

– Christa

But the longer they sat with it, the more they understood that luck was the smaller part of the story. It was the relationships Steffany had formed long before that day that let this roll of the dice land their way.

The flexibility she had shown at their first meeting. The empathy and honesty with which she had handled those initial conversations. The support and advice she had given to Nolan’s birth mom without any expectation.

Steffany had earned the trust of both halves of this family, separately, before they even became a family. No amount of reach or marketing could have done that.

Only a person close enough to build strong bonds with everyone involved.

Christa, a speech-language pathologist by profession, gets to watch her own son find his voice one word at a time. He is a giggly and sociable baby, and waves at every stranger in the grocery store. He does something new nearly every day that makes them laugh.

“It’s true what they say. The days are long and the years are short.” – Christa

The family are still in touch with Nolan’s birth mom and share regular updates. She spent the morning of his first birthday with him, and Christa says seeing her interact with Nolan was her favorite part of the whole birthday weekend.

They want Nolan to grow up knowing her, and that door stays open for them to form a relationship over time.

When friends began struggling to have children of their own, and started asking Richard and Christa about adoption, there was no hesitation over who to recommend.

Steffany was the only name they gave.

Ask Richard what sets her apart and he doesn’t reach for anything about size, reach, or speed.

“Adoption is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and you cannot get through it without empathy from everyone around you. I can’t think of a more empathetic person than Steffany.
She is doing what she is supposed to be doing in the world.”
– Richard

And that, in the end, is what it is all about.

Bringing a child into a family doesn’t take a national network, or a huge reach, or being the biggest name in the room.

It takes people who are absolutely dedicated to placing babies with families who will love them, and who understand that how they treat everyone in that process, hopeful parents and birth moms alike, is not the soft part of the job.

It’s the whole of it.

We began by saying that choosing an agency looks like a decision you can make on paper. The wait times, the costs, the reach. But all that is academic.

The thing that matters most is the one thing a brochure can never show you: the person on the other side, and whether they will take the time to build a real relationship with you, and to care as deeply for the birth family as they do for you.

What looks right on paper and what feels right in person aren’t always the same. That’s why choosing an agency is such a personal decision, and one only you can make.