How About These … ?

One year ago my OH and I had the following text message exchange. The initial message I received when I was driving home from work. OH: Just reading [SW Name] email about sibling group. I don’t know how you feel, but I would like to enquire more about these children. We can discuss it more when I get home, just about to leave off xx Me: Haven’t read it yet, just got to my parents’ house x OH: Ok, the profile sounds promising! xx At this point, I am standing in my parents living room being talked to by my Mum

The Year Gone By

This year has been a pretty amazing roller-coaster of a ride. At the beginning of the year all seemed great; we had our final few assessment sessions ahead of us, our Approval Panel date had been set and we had been approached by social services about a pair of siblings who just seemed perfect. Our Prospective Adopters Report read very well, our social worker got us spot on – the rough and the smooth – and it was on the back of this that we were approached in the first place. We were on Cloud 9; all these tales of

Big Day

Today was the day our home became our youngest child’s longest home. This can be a very significant day for an adopted child. For us though, due to our child’s age, I think today has gone unnoticed. We had the same temper tantrums and, shall we say, “exploring the function of teeth” as we have had over the last few months. No changes in behaviour at all, although we didn’t expect any. I think when the equivalent day for our oldest comes it will be far more significant, but that is some way off.

The Best Present

We have received the best Christmas present anyone ever can this year. We have become the irrefutable, absolute, legal parents of our children. (with no backsies!) Shortly after my post in September, we sent off the Adoption Order paperwork. We hoped that we had managed to get it to the court in time for it to be processed before Christmas, but we expected to be too late. We had been told it should take about 12 weeks, and that took us up to and probably beyond Christmas. A couple of weeks later we received a letter from the court telling

The State of Adoption

Over the past year or two there has been a lot of governmental attention given to adoption and the adoption process. Most significantly the decision to streamline the approval process has greatly reduced the amount of time it takes for a prospective adopter to be approved. This was billed as being necessary because there weren’t enough adopters coming through in order to place the children requiring permanent homes, and those that were were taking too long to be approved. In part this was due to the sheer level of bureaucracy involved and, in my opinion, the lack of structure to the

Life Story Books

Here’s a post I promised a couple of months ago about what are called Life Story Books. Somewhere along the line ‘the powers that be’ found rather than concealing a child had been adopted, treating it as a taboo subject, as if it were something to be ashamed of, that if someone knows where they came from and why they are better able to become well-rounded individuals. One of the things which social services are now obligated to do to help with this is to provide every adopted child a Life Story Book. So what are they? They are a

The Road So Far…

In the grand scheme of things our journey and travels through the adoption process have been quite short. Many prospective adopters wait a lot longer to be linked to a child than we did. Many people have delays caused by problems with social services staffing issues, and sometimes prospective adopters get assigned a social worker to assess them that they just don’t feel comfortable with. Occasionally social workers make mistakes which delay things – they are human, they make mistakes – and sometimes Life just gets in the way. I am pleased to say we have experienced very few of those of things and

Conversations with a pre-verbal child

Before I write this post I would like to point out that I’m not mad, while these conversations are based on real events they never actually happened anywhere other than in my head. The Request Child: That looks interesting. *points to age inappropriate object out of reach* Parent: No, you can’t have that. Child: Can I have that please? *points again, moves closer* Parent: No, that’s not for you. *moves child away from object and next to some toys in attempt to distract* Child: I want that toy! *returns to object, points again* Parent: That isn’t a toy, you can’t have it.

It’s been a while, but here we are…

So, for some reason I’ve been a bit busy for writing blog posts. This isn’t just adoption related but work related too as (don’t tell anyone but…) a lot of my posts are actually written on my work computer. We are currently on the cusp of sending off our adoption paperwork so that the court can decide whether to change us from ‘Prospective Adoptive Parents’ to ‘Adoptive Parents’. There are quite a few differences between the two, mostly legal, but at that point we no longer need to deal with social services unless we want to. We would contact their