Paperwork day
Hubby and I spent most of the day filling out our home study paperwork, copying our personal documents, and printing out photos. All we have left are the financial statements, which apparently we get from our social worker at our first orientation meeting. This was the meeting that was scheduled June 13, which had to be postponed due to my mother’s death. S.T. (social worker) emailed us tonight and advised she’s ready to schedule the orientation meeting, so that is exciting.
We have a pretty good draft of our “birth mother” book, but we still have to make a letter that we hand out to everyone we know advising that we are wanting to adopt. I worry sometimes that no one will ever pick us, and we’ll be waiting forever, but we’ll never know until we try. We keep talking about foster care adoption, but all the meetings we’ve gone to about foster care they bring up the fact that most of the children awaiting adoption are older. My husband doesn’t want to adopt a child that’s older than how long we’ve been married, and I guess I see my husband’s point. Maybe if we have been waiting a long time for a private adoption child and nothing is working we’ll go the foster care route, or perhaps we’ll decide just to not have kids, I really don’t know.
Once we get the social work side completed, I am not sure what’s next. I suppose waiting is what happens next. I am not sure when we’re going to work on the “we’re adopting” letter, I guess as soon as possible. Tomorrow I think is going to be a little busy to work on any more of this. We can’t find any copies of our marriage certificate, which is the last document we need for the home study. We’re planning on going to the county courthouse Tuesday morning to pick another copy up.
I hope this is a little easier the second time around. I think we spent so much time thinking and debating and hoping and waiting it feels like it’s taken FOREVER to get this done. I have been looking back in my blog posts and thinking back to when we started on this journey, and it seems like we have been taking such baby steps to get here. I wonder if it’s different for couples who are given a very straight answer that they will not be able to get pregnant. I wonder if what has taken us so long to move forward with each step is that the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, so there is always a hope that we will get pregnant. I think I’m okay with not being pregnant, but I’m not okay with not having any kids at all.
As we’ve been waiting and praying for kids, I just keep praying that God will make me not want to have kids and make me stop thinking about it. I’ve also been praying for it to get easier. I have been thankful that most people have been supportive and given us kind words of encouragement as we’ve gone down this path, rather than judging us or telling us what we’ve done wrong. That would make it even harder if people weren’t excited for us or supportive.
A lot of my husband’s family friends have adopted children, and there are a lot of adoptive families at our church, which is good, it makes me not feel as weird. In our circle of friends we’re the only ones, so that will be interesting as our kids get older. I definitely want to be open with them and let them know they’re adopted right from the beginning, but I just worry that they will feel weird if all their other friends are not adopted. I suppose it won’t really make a difference.
Those are things I want to start researching and reading about, now that we know this is the path we’re taking, and we’re going to keep plugging along until God definitely slams the door. I want to find out more about raising kids, how to bond with adopted babies, and how to deal with these different issues. I guess it’s not going to feel real until we have our child, I know we’re going to have a baby someday, but there is no set due date, no set time frame. When we first sat down with our attorney at the end of May of 07, we asked her how long it would take. She said about 1 year. We’ve given our birth mom book to one person and we weren’t selected, and no one else has wanted to see our birth mom book (but we also haven’t sent out the letters to all the different people we know). So, we’ll see if the time frame is a year, or longer. I’m trying not to think too far ahead, just trying to take it one step at a time, one meeting at a time.
Posted by: DramaQueen | 09-22-2007 | 09:09 PM
Posted in: Adoption Decisions | Waiting | God's Lessons | home study
I just wanted to let you know that we adopted our son through a private, domestic adoption nearly 3 years ago. You can read all about it on my blog under the “It wasn’t supposed to work this way” (Parts 1-10) series on my sidebar.
We were matched with his birth mother not through an agency but through a friend who remembered the paragraph in our Christmas newsletter asking for help in finding an adoption situation for us.
Now, we’re finishing the process of getting licensed to adopt through the state through their foster-to-adopt program. We’ve gone through all the hoops and now we’re just waiting for the state to give their rubber stamp approval. We’ve specified that we only want to be called on girls newborn-12 months. We are willing to consider a sibling group of 2 that includes 1 boy, as long as both children are younger than our son who turns 3 in December.
We’ve been told that it is very possible to adopt younger children through the state, especially if we’re willing to consider emergency receiving placements as well as foster-to-adopt. We know this can work because we have two friends in our city who adopted their sons through the state. Both boys were under a year when they received them. One of these two friends is now working on their 2nd state adoption, a little girl who came to them at 7 weeks old.
Explore all your options before you turn over a lot of money to a private agency. And even if you’ve already done that, don’t be afraid to continue to network on your own. Spreading the word among family and friends never hurts! That’s how we found our son.
If you have any questions or just need some moral support along the way, feel free to email me. I’m happy to help. I received a lot of great help by others when I was in the thick of things!
Take care and best of luck to you! May God bless you with your little one as soon as possible!
The social workers all gave us the same story about only older children and adoption - and we had more newborns than we could handle! The number of calls we turned down were unbelievable. We just had to foster and then adopt when the child couldn’t be reunited. If you are willing to specifically take a drug addicted baby, the chances are better. But I understand not wanting to go through the foster care roller coaster. It worked for us and for everyone in the class we went through - we ALL got to adopt.
Hey Jessie,
Thanks for commenting on our blog. I’ve been wondering how you guys have been doing with the move and adopting and everything else. So sorry to hear about your mom.
We miss you and Donald.
G
Yup, one step at a time. Hoping to hear some goodnews sooner than you expect!
Best of luck to you!! I’m a foster mom and I have two little kids now (and three bigger ones).