Our Intake Interview!

Share your questions about and experiences with adoption or surrogacy pregnancy alternatives.

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Our Intake Interview!

Postby Ivydragon » Oct 18, 2005 11:06 am

We started paperwork in August, (and are actually still working on the 2nd pack of it). Some of our reference letters had to come back from who they were sent to before we could have our first intake interview. Our adoption worker told us a few weeks ago that he was ready for us to schedule our first intake interview, so we go Thursday at 3:00. Oh, yeah, that means I need to find someone to watch the kids. . .

We're not really sure what to expect. You know, we've been through the whole scrutiny before to adopt, so that part doesn't bug us, but we've never adopted through an agency before because we were foster parents when we adopted Adam, and I'm just not quite sure what to expect. I think this meeting will be where we plunk down our initial $1,000 to commit to work with the agency.

Since we already have the 2nd pack of paperwork, we might be a step ahead of the game. There's an independent questionaire for both husband and wife - same questions, but you're supposed to do them separate. There's 44 questions! And we're not talking "yes" and "no" answers. There's also paperwork that describes our height, weight, college education, employment history, etc. We'll have to be fingerprinted, of course, for a criminal history background check. We have to have our Drs. comment on our physical fitness for adopting, too. There's a page all about our parents and siblings - they wanted to know height, weight, physical characteristics, education level, current address and hobbies. There's a page all about our income, debt, and insurance coverage. One page is all about our adoptive preferences - how open we want to be, whether or not we'd accept a sibling pair or twins, and what races we're ok with adopting. There was a huge list of physical, mental and drug induced complications listed that we had to decide on a scale of none to severe what was acceptible to us in a child we'd adopt - and whether or not we would accept that condition and how severe in the birth father and birth mother, and whether or not we'd accept a child born of an unknown birthfather. The list was way more comprehensive than when we were foster parents by far. We had to look up several of the diseases because although we've heard of most of them we didn't know exactly what they were or how it would affect a child's life, or whether or not it was heriditary from the mother or father's side of things. It was really interesting to hear how Alden felt about some of these things - it's not like most people would sit around and discuss most of the topics on that particular page - not that specific, anyways.

LDS Family Services has a cool website set up so that we can put up some pictures and talk about our family once we've had an approved homestudy, which isn't even scheduled, yet. It contains a search engine so that prospective birth parents can input some of their initial preferences, and weed out options first - so they aren't looking at 100's of families. So instead of just being presented to birth parents who come into the local office for counselling, birth parents from anywhere could look at our basic profile and be interested in us. Sometimes it feels like waiting to be found like a needle in a haystack, but on the other hand we really feel like we're supposed to adopt again, so we just have to have faith that when the time is right someone will be interested in us, or someone who knows us will know a birthmom and connect us. It's hard to believe sometimes that anyone will be interested in us. We have friends who have adopted foreign, and worked for a foriegn adoption agency who work with lots of people who have tried adopting domestic and become unhappy with the experience and are now going foriegn. They say it's just a popularity or beauty contest - that the families with gorgeous or rich parents are always chosen - we are neither gorgeous or rich. But we do put our kids and our family first, and have lots of priceless attributes and hope that someone will like us for who we are. We just feel like we're on the right path working with LDS Family Services, so we're just going to trust that we are. It could still take years to adopt, but I'm ok with that, too.

Anyways, that's our update so far, and I'll let you know what this intake interview is like later this week.

Andy
Mom to Aaron 14 (HG), Anna 11 (HG), Adam 8 (adopted), Andrew 8 (adopted), fostering a newborn . . .
Ivydragon
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Postby caleighbelle47 » Dec 12, 2005 6:16 am

Good luck Andy. I'd really like to adopt through LDS family services one day so I'll be interested in seeing how your experience goes.

I also watched my parents go through the whole foster parent thing, so I know how endless the paperwork can be.
-Angela
Isabella- October 2004
John- September 2005
Phoenix- July 2008
Hazel- March 2010
http://caleighbabies.blogspot.com/
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caleighbelle47
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Postby caleighbelle47 » Dec 12, 2005 6:17 am

I just realized that this thread is two months old, I didn't even look at the date first :oops: .
-Angela
Isabella- October 2004
John- September 2005
Phoenix- July 2008
Hazel- March 2010
http://caleighbabies.blogspot.com/
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caleighbelle47
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Location: Utah

Postby Ivydragon » Dec 12, 2005 12:50 pm

Yeah, well, my "how it went" isn't exactly timely, lol.

Our adoption case worker is really really nice. He's been working for LDS Family Services in adoption for like my entire life! He's pretty much seen it all. He said that he's not all about hiding information, either. If he sees an issue in our paperwork, he'll let us know and help us resolve it. I feel much less like I have to impress the guy than just be myself. We can't see him again until we have all of our paperwork in. That is taking longer than I thought. It didn't help that most of us weren't established with Drs. in the area, yet, and that Alden and I still didn't have in-state driver's licenses, and we thought we better at least be local drivers before we had our fingerprints done.

So, 4 of 5 appointments for Drs. are done, other not scheduled until late Jan., but with Alden's work schedule, we don't dare ask for a day off until then, and it's his appointment. We are now Idaho drivers, we passed our written exams, and we have to sit down and follow this complex system of applying for fingerprinting. We were literally sent a document of 13 pages that the State Employees use to navigate the NEW system for applying for fingerprinting. Most of our paperwork is done, except for our financial paperwork, but I didn't want to do that in August and submit in Jan.

Every few weeks we are a bit further into it all, and that is really all we can expect. At first you just want to get it all done at once, but life just doesn't stop for adoption paperwork, and when you have to feed the kids, and wait for Dr. appointments, and work around people's schedules, well, you just have to be patient.

I really feel pretty peaceful about the whole waiting thing right now - it will probably change later on, but I've been in the "going crazy waiting" phase before, and I'll hold on to peaceful waiting as long as I can before I'm so baby hungry I can't think of anything else. It'll come back, I'm sure - but it's not back, yet.

I'll try to keep you up to better date . . . trying to decide to get a new family photo. Our last one is now 18 months old, and Adam's grown quite a bit, and I look diff. now that my hair is long again. Just hate picking out what everyone should wear.

Hugs, Andy
Mom to Aaron 14 (HG), Anna 11 (HG), Adam 8 (adopted), Andrew 8 (adopted), fostering a newborn . . .
Ivydragon
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Posts: 1350
Joined: Mar 31, 2004 12:55 am
Location: Northern Idaho


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