Then We Were Four

Under Repair

26th March 2015 Then We Were Four Adoption, LGBT 6 comments

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

21st March 2015 Then We Were Four Adoption, LGBT, Matching Leave a comment

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

11th March 2015 Then We Were Four Adoption, LGBT, Matching 11 comments

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.

Linked

2nd March 2015 Then We Were Four Adoption, Matching 10 comments

Let me rewind a few weeks back to before we were approved and when I wrote this: Connections. In it I wrote “Our social worker has also provided some information about another sibling group and that too sounds promising” but I haven’t mentioned anything since. The reason I hadn’t was because those children hadn’t yet been given a Placement Order meaning that they couldn’t be adopted but only kept in foster care until such time as they got one, which may not ever happen. We were approached by these siblings’ family finder social worker rather than the other way around,

Approval Panel

17th February 2015 Then We Were Four Adoption, LGBT, Stage 2 5 comments

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,

Connections

30th January 2015 Then We Were Four Adoption, Stage 2 Leave a comment

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

18th January 2015 Then We Were Four Adoption, LGBT, Marriage, Stage 2 Leave a comment

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

8th January 2015 Then We Were Four Adoption, LGBT, Stage 2 Leave a comment

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

20th December 2014 Then We Were Four Adoption, Stage 2 One comment

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

17th December 2014 Then We Were Four Adoption Leave a comment

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