Goodbyes and Hellos

We’ve said some goodbyes over the last two weeks. Firstly to our Social Worker who came to the end of her placement for her course, so has moved on. She has to finish her course with dissertations and other such academic things, then she’ll be starting her new job. We have enjoyed working with her and really appreciate the hard work she has put in to getting us as far as we did within the time she had with us. There were some hiccups along the way, and we still aren’t absolutely certain of the future, but she was there

The Interrogation?

Stage 2 Adoption Assessment: Session 4 – a one on one interview with the social worker. This was the first session where I felt a bit anxious beforehand. I was fine until OH (who had his the day before mine) told me a couple of the questions that he was asked. My response being “I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to answer those questions”, and I still didn’t when I was inevitably asked them. The social worker had a set of questions to ask and talk around, but fortunately it was nothing like the interrogation that I feared it

Stage 2 Assessment – Session 2

Education, Work, Drugs, Smoking and Alcohol – a heady mix for our second session with the social worker! We talked through our education and how we found school in general, including whether we were bullied and how we handled it, and how that would translate into dealing with the bullying of a child of our own. We were also asked about what our general attitude to education was and how we would be able to support a child academically and beyond. I think our answers were quite good for this as we’ve got a reasonable mix of academia and practicality

No Contact! Contact!

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

Glacial Feedback

Just as I was starting to think about looking into some form of cryogenic suspension so that I could be woken up when the adoption agency had done something with our Stage 1 workbook my partner got a phone call from one of the social workers. (Let’s just say “Patient” wasn’t one of the 5 words I used to describe myself in the workbook) She was writing up a report which would then go to her manager for a final decision and she wanted some further details about our ‘support network’, namely how far away they were from us and

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