Progression!

We received word yesterday that we have passed Stage 1 of the approval process. This means that our adoption agency processed the replacement reference in under 2 weeks, which, from what I’ve seen from other people’s delays and frustrations, is astonishingly fast. Let me summarise our process so far. Early March – Attended LGBT Adoption Week event after seeing it advertised on New Family Social‘s facebook page. Here we expressed our interest with our local authority about adopting through them. Within 2 days we had received and information pack and an invitation to an Information Event. We had been under

Sabotage!

We now know that we won’t be progressing to Stage 2 of the adoption process on schedule. We appear to have sabotaged our own application by providing references which didn’t fit the criteria they wanted. We had to give 3 references, only one of which could be a family member. We interpreted family member to be immediate family, brothers, sisters and parents. We even asked (apparently the wrong people) if our references would be ok and were told they would be. So we continued with my brother, a school friend and my partner’s cousin’s partner. Guess which one is not

Glacial Feedback

Just as I was starting to think about looking into some form of cryogenic suspension so that I could be woken up when the adoption agency had done something with our Stage 1 workbook my partner got a phone call from one of the social workers. (Let’s just say “Patient” wasn’t one of the 5 words I used to describe myself in the workbook) She was writing up a report which would then go to her manager for a final decision and she wanted some further details about our ‘support network’, namely how far away they were from us and

DBS Certificate

Just a quick update on my previous post. The adoption agency have confirmed that they had already been told that we have received our DBS Certificates, and they have said that because they contain “No Information” (i.e. they prove we don’t have a criminal record of any kind) they do not “need sight of them”. That means that the agency definitely have got all the information they need to progress us to Stage 2. The 2 months that Stage 1 is meant to take finishes on the 25th of August, so we will know by then if we can proceed.

Not a criminal!

It’s official, I have no criminal record according to the Disclosure and Barring Service certificate I have received in the post today. Of course I knew that already, but at least that’s another hoop that we’ve successfully jumped through. I’m just waiting to see if I need to send the certificate anywhere to prove I’m above board or if the adoption agency has received something already. I imagine that seeing as they requested the checks they’ll already know the results, and no one has told us we need to send the certificate anywhere (we didn’t even know we were going

The Waiting Game

As of 5.30pm last night we have completed everything we can for Stage 1 of the Adoption Approval Process. The “Health & Safety Check” turned out to be more of a look around the house making suggestions on what we might want to do to make things totally safe for a toddler. There wasn’t much we needed to do, some of our windows open out so far that an adult could fall out of them! So it will be a good idea to limit their opening capability. The only other main point we were told about was the pond, although

Moving Forward

Well, that was a productive weekend. On Friday we went to a training day entitled “Introduction to Adoption Day”, it was like being at school again. They had us and all the other prospective adopters sitting at tables in a horseshoe arrangement with three social workers and an outreach worker at the front talking to us. It was quite informative and certainly a useful insight into what is to come next. We were put into groups a couple of times, with couples being split into different groups so we worked with people we didn’t know. The activities we were assigned

Reading, More Reading and Medicals

The “resource list” that we have been given for the adoption process is as long as I am tall (which isn’t exactly tall, much to my detriment when calculating my BMI). Over the last few weeks we’ve both been ploughing through as much as we can before the 29th when we’ve got to hand our Adoption Workbook in with comments about what we have read. I’ve been reading mostly about attachment and bonding recently, much of which appears to be common sense, but I have found some of it quite enlightening and it will certainly be helpful in future I’m

Workshop

Yesterday we went to what was called an “Adoption Workshop”, we were a bit worried as it coincided with strike action from council workers and it was an 80 mile round trip to get there. Our fears were unfounded though and it all went ahead as expected. What has become apparent recently is that our adoption agency is still finding its feet with the new 2 stage process. This is fairly understandable as it is less than a year old, and they do seem to be very open about the fact they’re still learning and adapting it to improve it

References and DBS Checks

This past week we’ve heard from 2 of our references that the questionnaire they need to fill in has arrived and we’ve been to County Hall with our identification documents to initalise the DBS check. Firstly I would like to say how lucky we are to have the support of our friends and family during this process. One of our references in particular, despite both her and her husband having to work full-time in relatively inflexible jobs and being parents of a 1 year old little cutie she has found the time to speak to us about the questions she’s