Children and Dogs

During our blip one of the minor reasons that was first suggested as to why we wouldn’t be a suitable family for our children was that we had two dogs. For the time being I will ignore the fact that this was stated in our Prospective Adopters Report and that we were initially approached by Social Services about the children and not the other way around.

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 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

Introducing Introductions

One year ago today we officially got accepted onto the adoption agency’s books, and entered The Process. One year later we met our children for the first time. From the outset it was clear that the foster carer had been preparing them for meeting us and the first words spoken, fairly unprompted, by one of the children was “It’s Daddy and Dad”. Definitely heart melting! We only spent a couple of hours with them today, and an amazing couple of hours it was. We saw a little bit of foster carer discipline which was very good to see, did a

Matching Panel

So, just before being able to write a post about Matching Panel I was “advised” to stop writing my blog publicly. This post is the first one I’ve written since then and is intended to be privately published. Despite having been “advised” for a good 10 minutes about why I shouldn’t write it I am still unclear on the precise reasoning behind it. Anyway, we had Panel. We were asked a few questions about how we will cope, including about recent losses and how that will affect OH. We were asked about how we would deal with questions about birth

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