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