adopt

We still haven’t gotten our corrected license, but it’s in the works. The sw said she had some bad news so I braced myself. But it was only that she was transferring. We’ve come to expect lots of sw turnover. She said our new sw is more organized and better at matching than she was, which is great news. She said our new sw keeps good contact with the county placement workers and has more time to keep on top of the process, which may mean a shorter wait for our match. We met her in the MAAP classes, and I thought she was a bit naive and condescending but perhaps this will be a good change overall.

I heard about a non-profit matching service, Adopt America Network, that will match parents with children from foster care nationwide. I think they mostly work with older children, but I’m going to look at their web site.

We received our officially signed homestudy and handbook this week! The letter said our certification license was included, but it wasn’t. So I called the secretary, who seemed annoyed that I called until I mentioned it was said to be included. Then she said thanks for reminding her, she needs to get that signed and mailed, but Thursday is a holiday. Okaaaaay.

But she got it in the mail fairly quickly. Unfortunately, there is a typo. On it, we are certified for one child. It’d be hard to accept a sibling group (always the plan!) if we’re certified for one. sigh. Shouldn’t be a big deal to fix, just another thing to follow up on and make me concerned about the agency’s competence.

Every other month there is a meeting between the nearby counties to discuss children and families waiting for a match. There was one two weeks ago, but fortunately we got mentioned since our homestudy was nearly done.

Today it gets faxed officially to the fost/adopt placement departments. Our sw expects it will take 12 months to find our match, but it’s possible we could get calls this week if there are children that fit our criteria that have been waiting. How exciting!

If we don’t get called and time drags on, we can expand our criteria. Or we can take a foster child (who’d have a goal of reunification with bio family) while we wait. It will be interesting to see how this next year unfolds.

The sw’s supervisor reviewed our homestudy, and the sw sent it over last week for our review! I braced myself before I read it, since I never got the option to read our previous two and expected it would be full of private info.

But it was actually really nice. We sound so great I want us for parents. hehe. It was a summary of our history and strengths. Yes, it includes private info but it is positive and true.

Our approval as an adoptive family is finally sinking in and like a weight has been lifted off me.

Today the sw is faxing our homestudy to all the placement people in nearby counties. In other types of adoption apparently the homestudies stay in a file, but with fost/adopt they get faxed all around to locate a match. Well, nothing can be done about that, hard as it may be for private people. I’ll just focus on the end result. :)

My expectations were completely off. I thought that if we used a private agency (in other words, we were paying), the homestudy process wouldn’t take so long. (Our county had a waiting list and no sw assigned to homestudies when we started this time.)

The time line has been ridiculous. We made the initial call mid July 2007. We went to the orientations, chose a program, and took the required classes over 3-4 months. Then we took the holidays off. We signed our application and wrote the check around new years, and turned in all our listed paperwork in March. In May we finished our home inspection and she said she’d have the homestudy written within the week.

Then the agency got audited. So she stopped doing homestudies for two months! Then she got some projects from their domestic program, so we got put aside again.

So when they lost another item and needed more info and documentation on other items, it seemed this would go on forever. She apologized every time she called and of course I said, no problem I understand.

Having the approval withheld and hanging over us has been awful. My consolation is that maybe the babies we are meant to be matched with aren’t ready for us yet, and God is slowing us down to wait for them.

I just want the approval, then I can relax and wait. sigh.

There was an incident a long time ago, that is really best left in the past. But it came up during the homestudy. It required getting official paperwork from far away officials, written statements, then additional paperwork. I really thought it was going to take months to locate, request and gather what was needed. Amazingly, the power of the internet saved the day and it took about a week. It was emotionally difficult to deal with, but didn’t delay us.

The social worker said they had enough info about our special needs son according to her supervisor, but she wanted to get some more positive comments from his therapist to make the homestudy more well-rounded and positive. She thought that would help us be chosen.

His therapist is great at goofing off and being a big kid, relating to the kids well. But not great at paperwork or following through with the parents. So I asked his teacher (who works with the therapist) to write the letter. It turned into a big ordeal, with the teacher saying he needed special permission from the district and probably signed releases. So I asked him to email me, for my info, an update on how he’s doing, with the questions the sw had as a basis. I didn’t hear back and got all stressed out. But they were just having email issues. He sent it to me, I forwarded it, and one more thing done.

The agency had all the results and checked it off their list, but one was missing from the file. So, they had to officially request another copy, which took three weeks.

I am not stable yet to adopt but someday I would like to have my life fiuired out and my relationshop with scott secure enough to adopt a child or sibling group. it’s not anytime soon though maybe when I am older then 20 lol