A little while ago I agreed to do an interview with the adoption agency who we went through for an article about LGBT Adoption & Fostering Week. At the time I thought it would be a written one and I would be able to take some time answering the questions. Unfortunately I then found out it would be over the phone and I nearly backed out of it. I’m much better at articulating myself in writing than talking, but eventually I decided to continue with it. The article that was written was ok although nothing special, I can’t link to it
Category: LGBT
LGBT Adoption & Fostering Week
Our story began at an event held for LGBT Adoption & Fostering week in 2014. Yours can begin this year…
Out With Dads
Children, especially younger ones, tend to be literal creatures. With little experience of social convention they say things as they see them, whether that may be offensive to someone or not. It usually leads to hilarious moments, followed by a red-faced parent apologising for the socially unacceptable thing your child has just said. Children also have no prejudice until it is implanted into them by external factors, they don’t care about your gender, sexuality, race, or religion. Our children are no different. It is impossible to go out as a family without it being blatantly obvious we are a two-dad
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
Under Repair
Where to begin (this is going to be a long one!)… As it turns out in my post Linked when I said we were officially linked apparently I was wrong, it was just a provisional link. I have now corrected that blog post. We have since learnt that our agency have something called a Family Linking Meeting (FLM) which is where the link is made official. Just after the aforementioned blog post we had a meeting with the Family Finder (FF) social worker and the children’s social worker (CSW). While we didn’t necessarily feel that meeting went very well, we were
Support
The last couple of weeks have been very hard for us. Something that has become so incredibly clear to us has been the level of total unconditional support that we have from pretty much everyone we know, and even people we don’t. So, this post is a massive thank you! We cannot express how lucky we feel to have you all behind us. The New Family Social forum has been absolutely brilliant, after I posted a message on there we received many messages of support and advice, all of which have been vital. The comments on my previous blog post
Broken
Never have I understood the words “if things seem too good to be true, they probably are” more than today. We are broken. Despite driving things forward at an incredible pace since late January, the family finder social worker has severed our link with the siblings for reasons we are yet to know or understand. We are devastated, not just for us but for the children, in my opinion they have been wronged too. I have nothing else to say.
Approval Panel
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,
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
