Moving Forward

So in my last post I said that we signed up in June 2000, that's not quite right. It was June 19Th, 2001.

We had spent a long time discussing the right adoption route for us and getting input from family and friends. When all was said and done we bit the bullet and I printed out what seemed like an entire ream of paper! It was the adoption application, the adoption questionnaire and the guide book to help you fill out the other two. Whew! So that took quite a while.

Sitting with the piles of papers in front of us it felt daunting and completely overwhelming. What were we getting ourselves into?! So we took a deep breath and dove in.

A couple of hours later we had completed the two sets of paper work that needed to be filled out. What was the next step? We had to find an adoption worker. We went to the office of our local Ministry of Children and Family Development and asked to see an adoption worker. We were told that she (yes only one and that surprised us) wouldn't be back in the office until the following week. So, we made an appointment.

The following week the worker called us to confirm and let us know which papers she would like us to fill out and bring in. She was quite surprised and pleased that we had everything done as well as some other documents that we thought she might be interested in seeing. Those documents pertained to my health issues for the most part.

Then begins the interesting part. At least as far as I'm concerned. LOL

The worker has us do a criminal record check, passed, a physician's report, passed, references, positive, and then the big scary AEP. For those of you not familiar with the AEP it stands for Adoption Education Program. This is a 4 or 5 week training/information course that all prospective adoptive families must take prior to beginning their home study.

In my opinion, this course is designed to weed out those who are not completely committed and serious about adoption. They have guest speakers come in and talk about their adoption experiences, good and not so good to down right bad, as well as speakers who explain some of the more common special needs that come with some of the children.

These speakers are wonderfully informative and extremely forthcoming and I've never met one who sugar coats anything! Just the way I like it.

So we managed to get into the AEP for the fall session. After our first day I was sure hubby would say NO WAY! We learned about Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder as well as Reactive Attachment Disorder and some other stuff too. I thought for sure he'd been scared off, but not my man! He was ready to deal with whatever God sent our way. I was so happy!

Once we'd finished the AEP we immediately contacted our adoption worker and told her we were ready to start the home study. The next BIG SCARY PART, and she informed us it would be a while as her caseload was full. We were saddened. It wasn't long before we got a call from the worker telling us that we'd been contracted out. That means that our worker was too busy to do our home study so the Ministry contracted a certain number of home studies to be done by a private agency. That was us.

Our private worker was wonderful! She got our weird sense of humour immediately and even better than that had misunderstood her instructions for our home study. Yes a mistake that worked in our favour! Her instructions were that she had 5 home studies to do and they all had to be started by a certain date in March. She misunderstood and thought that she had to have all 5 completed by that certain date in March! We were at the end of February and finished and approved (by the private agency) by the end of March! Oh what joy! That meant all we needed was our ministry worker to go over the home study and submit it to her supervisor for final approval and we would officially be in the waiting phase of adopting.

Well that didn't happen. Our worker decided that the home study really wasn't complete and spent another 6 months "fixing" the home study (6 months is typically about how long it takes to do a complete home study) before she would submit for final approval.

In the next installment I'll tell you how we spent our waiting period. ;)