Lifestyle Assessment

Adoption Stage 2 Assessment Session 3 – this was far more innocuous than I thought it was going to be. Nothing controversial and nothing even remotely presumptuous about how we live our lives.

We were asked about how we spend our evenings, what our favourite films, music and books were and that kind of thing.  We also discussed our interests and skills and how we could use them in relation to a child. During this I may have upset the social worker by revealing that the first time she visited with her supervising social worker I had baked a cake for them to have, but they hadn’t wanted a cup of tea or coffee so the cake never got brought out – she seemed quite gutted about missing out.

The topic of religion came up, and we discussed what our feelings were towards it.  This would be important for maintaining the culture of the child being adopted, so they could get a better match from that point of view. We aren’t religious, but aren’t prejudice against any religion (shame the reverse isn’t always true!) so long as people don’t try to convert us on the doorstep (although I like a good debate so the few people that we did have doing that seem to have disappeared).

The social worker also wanted to go through our plan to child-proof the things that were identified as potential issues from the Stage 1 “home health and safety check” and she seemed satisfied with what we had planned. We also showed her the bedrooms that we are planning on assigning the child/children that we get as well as a brief foray into the, currently, bog-like back garden.

I can’t speak for OH (although I think he feels similarly) but I’m really enjoying the assessment so far, and I find myself counting down the days to the next session. Our social worker is really nice, we get along with her well and she is incredibly easy to talk to, which has got to be positive. She is a student social worker and we found out we are the only people she is assessing, this is good in that we are her sole focus, and she seems to be discussing us with her supervising social worker who we met in “Session 0” quite a lot so I don’t think we’re missing out on anything from having her assigned to us. She will be moving on in the summer next year, but she’s hopeful we’ll have a family by then, at least that’s her goal (and ours I guess!). Dads by Summer 2015, that’s exciting!

Two of our references have had their interviews as well, our social worker seemed very happy with what they said and said they were very positive (Thank you!!). I may ask one of them to write a short paragraph about what they were asked, as information regarding this seems a bit lacking. I think it varies from agency to agency and social worker to social worker, but I’ll see if there is anything worth mentioning.

The next two sessions are one on one interviews, going back to the beginning for each of us, done individually. OH’s is first so I might have some idea of what that’s like before having to do mine (assuming he tells me!)

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