Yesterday was crunch day. The day that our assessment has been leading up to over the past few months – PANEL DAY! It doesn’t matter how much people tell you that Approval Panel isn’t as daunting as it seems, that we’ll be fine, that it’s not that bad etc, etc. Until you’re in there speaking to them you can’t help but envision some horrendous auditorium with people judging you from a distance. At the beginning of the assessment process you are told that Approval Panel is a group of up to 10 (yes TEN!) people from various fields including medical people,
Category: Adoption
Connections
It has been about 2 weeks since my last post and of the three things that I said we expected to happen in that time have happened. For the most part at least. We received the draft copy of the PAR. For those of you unfamiliar with what a PAR is, it is basically all the information that our social worker has gleaned from us and our references since the assessment process began written up into a report. We don’t get to see what our references have said about us only what we’ve said about ourselves and what has been
Matching & Marriage
This past week and bit has been eventful in some ways and really not in others. We attended some training on Tuesday about how the matching process works both from ours and the children’s perspectives. It seems like we’ve inadvertently already started this process even though we’re not approved yet. We have signed up to Children Who Wait and Be My Parent, both of which are online and paper magazines detailing the profiles of children who need adopting. We did this to get some idea of what profiles would look like rather than to find a child, but it’s difficult
The Final Countdown
The final assessment session (7) has been completed. We’re now on the countdown towards our approval panel date. The subjects of this session were “Identity” and (yet again) “Child Care”. Identity was a little bit woolly to begin with, and attempting to define what I considered to be my identity was odd. Eventually, to make it easier, we got asked “How would you describe yourself in a Two’s Company advert?”. I’m not sure “34 yr old man with GSOH seeks similar for family life” is really what she intended, I didn’t actually say that although we had a bit of
Not Just an Assessment
Yesterday everything became real. We aren’t just being assessed to be approved to be adoptive parents. We WILL become parents (subject to approval of course). Our social worker decided to do our profile before the Christmas break and sent it to us yesterday. It’s a really nice write up including a few pictures (which I hate because they have me in them!). I think it really captures us well and gives a good summary of what we have to offer. Along with that she sent us some children’s profiles from another authority who need to be placed away from their
Expecting Expectations
Stage 2 Adoption Assessment: Session 6. This one was difficult. Not insomuch as we had a problem with answering the questions, more to do with the feelings of guilt and self judgement when we answered them honestly. It was about what our expectations were from adoption (at least that’s how it was presented to us). Basically, this was the time when we started to apply the filter criteria of the type of children we think we would be able to cope with or not. That means we had to say no to certain groups of children for certain reasons, leaving
Adoption Motivations
Stage 2 Adoption Assessment: Session 5 What are our motivations to adopt? That was the key question to this session. It could have been a very short one with the answer of “we want to have a family” but it’s not as simple as that, and although that is the main underlying reason for us wanting to adopt it is not the clear cut, bottom line, black and white answer that it would appear to be. We were questioned about how long we have wanted to have children, why we were looking to adopt now and not earlier or later, which of
The Interrogation?
Stage 2 Adoption Assessment: Session 4 – a one on one interview with the social worker. This was the first session where I felt a bit anxious beforehand. I was fine until OH (who had his the day before mine) told me a couple of the questions that he was asked. My response being “I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to answer those questions”, and I still didn’t when I was inevitably asked them. The social worker had a set of questions to ask and talk around, but fortunately it was nothing like the interrogation that I feared it
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
Stage 2 Assessment – Session 2
Education, Work, Drugs, Smoking and Alcohol – a heady mix for our second session with the social worker! We talked through our education and how we found school in general, including whether we were bullied and how we handled it, and how that would translate into dealing with the bullying of a child of our own. We were also asked about what our general attitude to education was and how we would be able to support a child academically and beyond. I think our answers were quite good for this as we’ve got a reasonable mix of academia and practicality
