Schedule Change

We met our Stage 2 social workers yesterday. Our assessment is starting next week. The provisional date for our approval panel is in February. Well, that was quick. Lots of dates in diaries, a few more training courses booked up, and we’re off. Twoish months ahead of what we had originally scheduled. I think because our assessing social worker is in training and under the supervision of the senior practitioner assigned to us she had more dates free in her diary than if it were the senior practitioner alone doing our assessment. This meant that she could work around our work

The Preparation Group

On Sunday I was unapproachable, irritable, short tempered, and I had a headache. Why? I was anxious about the preparation group that we were going to be attending on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week. To most people this probably wouldn’t have been a problem, certainly nothing to get anxious about; it was just a bit of training before we can move on to Stage 2 of the approval process. But, me being me, I’d over inflated the bits which I wasn’t looking forward to and forgotten the bits that I was. So, in my mind, we’d be going to

Cracks?

This week has seen some good and bad from the adoption agency. I think there may be some cracks in their seemingly well organised processes. We received an email from the ‘Training Team’ about the preparation group we are booked on next week, which detailed where it is and what time to get there, along with a brief outline of what we will be doing. It also told us we needed to have read the corresponding sections of the Adoption Workbook we’ve been given in Stage 1 to gain the full benefit. Wait. What? Adoption Workbook? What’s that then? I

Progression!

We received word yesterday that we have passed Stage 1 of the approval process. This means that our adoption agency processed the replacement reference in under 2 weeks, which, from what I’ve seen from other people’s delays and frustrations, is astonishingly fast. Let me summarise our process so far. Early March – Attended LGBT Adoption Week event after seeing it advertised on New Family Social‘s facebook page. Here we expressed our interest with our local authority about adopting through them. Within 2 days we had received and information pack and an invitation to an Information Event. We had been under

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

Moving Forward

Well, that was a productive weekend. On Friday we went to a training day entitled “Introduction to Adoption Day”, it was like being at school again. They had us and all the other prospective adopters sitting at tables in a horseshoe arrangement with three social workers and an outreach worker at the front talking to us. It was quite informative and certainly a useful insight into what is to come next. We were put into groups a couple of times, with couples being split into different groups so we worked with people we didn’t know. The activities we were assigned

Reading, More Reading and Medicals

The “resource list” that we have been given for the adoption process is as long as I am tall (which isn’t exactly tall, much to my detriment when calculating my BMI). Over the last few weeks we’ve both been ploughing through as much as we can before the 29th when we’ve got to hand our Adoption Workbook in with comments about what we have read. I’ve been reading mostly about attachment and bonding recently, much of which appears to be common sense, but I have found some of it quite enlightening and it will certainly be helpful in future I’m

Information Overload

Good news everyone! We’ve been accepted into the adoption process. What’s more, the adoption agency actually managed to reply to us within the maximum time-frame they had allotted themselves. Now the process begins in earnest. Welcome to Stage 1 of the Adoption Approval Process. We had been expecting a phone call to confirm whether or not we had been accepted by the adoption agency, the form implied it and so did the social worker we spoke to, I even chased them up via email to make sure they had received our form (still no reply to that), but in the

Sleepless Thoughts

I had a night of no sleep whatsoever, too many thoughts of adoption keeping me awake! The books I ordered arrived yesterday, and reading through some of the stories in them it occurred to me that there is very little material on the new two stage adoption process which got implemented last year. So I thought I’d go back a step and describe what we’ve done so far. We had talked about having children pretty much right from the beginning of our relationship, and 2014 was the year we had decided we would start looking into it properly. I found