Building Our Family Through Adoption
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.
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,
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
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
Since being told we had a place on the October Preparation Group it has been total radio silence from the adoption agency. We know the dates that is it happening, but we don’t know where it is, what time it starts, if we need to do anything in preparation or if we need to take anything with us. In other words we feel totally unprepared for the Preparation Group. Then, at the tail end of last week, it changed. I was phoned by the Team Manager of the adoption team at the agency’s local office. I assume this means she’s the one
