We Just Talked About Stuff

This morning I had my individual interview with Amy our social worker. To my surprise, I wasn't nervous at all. However, in the middle of the interview, I felt as though someone had stuffed a handful of saltines into my mouth thus removing all saliva and making it difficult to swallow.The interview touched on a myriad of subjects both personal and practical. The personal questions were about my childhood, family life, school years, career choice, dating history... Stuff I don't normally have to speak about. Especially in such depth. As I've said before, It was a little bit like therapy.Then there were practical questions, like how we expect our lives to change after having the baby, our thoughts on discipline, what kind of parents we hope to be. It really made me examine the whole prospect of being a dad and luckily, I didn't feel like running out of the building screaming. In fact, the opposite happened. I left the interview with a sense of calm and serenity

Let's Give Thanks

I just wanted to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. If you're Canadian, sorry this greeting is so late. Not much to report this week. The only notable thing is that our social worker asked us if it was ok to use our interviews to train a new person. I guess that means she thinks we'll pass the homestudy! That, or she wants to show the new person what a lost cause looks like.

Anyway, hope everyone enjoys their turkey day... Wear loose pants.

Done and Done

Today I mailed off the last of the paperwork. It was a pretty big stack of papers but once it's done, it's done. The reason it took a while is because I had to go to my doctor to get a TB test and then wait 2 days to get the results... Negative!

This homestudy process is really moving along. Now it's just a matter of getting our interviews done. Two individual interviews and then one more couple interview. Also, our caseworker is going to come visit our house to make sure it's suitable for a baby. I guess that means we'll have to cover up the pit of broken glass in the hallway.

Work It

We're diligently working on our paperwork and it's going well so far. The hard one is the expense report. We have to do a budget of everything we spend our money on in a month and see if that number is less than the amount we bring in. We also have to show them employment verification, give a criminal record statement, and get a TB test. This begs the question, how come people who just get pregnant don't have to do all this stuff? I guess that's the way the life cookie crumbles.David has signed us up for some Workshops that are also required. The first one is the Preparing for Domestic Open Adoption workshop. It is a 5 night seminar that will guide us through the process. Topics include:

Resolving infertility
Making the decision to adopt
Special issues in raising adopted children
Understanding adoption from the perspective of adoptive parents, birthparents, and the adult adoptee.

The other required workshop is called Transracial Adoption. That one talks about how to be sensitive to the cultural heritage of a child that is not the same race as us. Since David and I are not the same race, most likely the baby will be of a different ethnic makeup than at least one of us.
Finally, there are several optional workshops that we will probably try to attend... Newborn Care, LGBT Adoptive parenting, Infant CPR, etc. I figure, the more we know, the better off we'll be.

Reality Writes

Last night was a big one! We went to Dopsh Cons (new nickname) to meet with Amy our social worker. She was super nice and answered every one of our newbie questions. She and her partner adopted through Adoption Connection so she's been in the exact same situation as us. My observation with social workers is that they have kind eyes and gentle voices.

First she outlined the process going forward. As a gay couple we'll face different but not necessarily harder challenges in the duration. One challenge might be if we are matched in a state with laws forbidding LGBT adoption. We might have to bring the birthmom to California to have the baby. I guess we'll cross that bridge if we come to it.

Next she did our first pair interview. The questions were about our relationship mostly. How we met, what we like and dislike about the other person, what we do for fun. It's a little strange getting interviewed about personal topics. It almost felt like therapy but the good news was, digging deep didn't wet the well with tears if you catch my drift.

Finally, she gave us our sizable stack of forms to fill out. Most of them are just signature required but some of them are more interesting. I'd say the two big ones are the personal REFERENCES and the personal PREFERENCES. Yes that's right. The references are to be 3 people who are not relatives filling out a questionnaire about if they think we'd be good parents. The preferences form is what situation we would be comfortable being matched with. You really have to do a lot of self examination with the latter form. We are faced with a multitude of factors that could result in any number of congenital defects or pre-natal substance exposure. But we only get this one life so we're throwing all caution to the wind, yo. We're just hoping the baby arrives healthy and happy.