The Homestudy begins

Our new adoption agency, CHOICES Counseling Service, approved our exception to the birth order clause.  We were able to transfer our files (References etc.) to the agency after a lot of head aches and back and forth.  In the end the decision to allow us access to our own personal information went all the way up to the director for adoption in BC.  If I was that lady I would not be impressed.  Why will nobody take responsibility for ANY decisions in this freaking industry? 

We were connected with our social worker Wednesday of last week and she agreed to meet with us on Friday morning, because we were going to be in town (It's a five hour drive to the city where she lives).  We met up with her at 9am and parted ways at 12pm.  We dove right in and held nothing back. The conversation was emotional at some times, informative at others, and interesting altogether.  Our social worker is a retired MCFD social worker (The supervisor for our region actually) and she now contracts out to the agencies and MCFD when she wants to. 
She suggested that our local social worker could have thought we didn't have enough experience with ministry kids.  I've sent her an email asking her to recommend ways for us to become more experienced, and I look forward to her response.

I also asked our adoptive parent/foster family friends how they would recommend we get more experience.  She offered to lend us her kids now and then, and also suggested we start taking care of (baby sit) the number of children we hope to adopt.  Also to document each and every time, and make up a resume of sorts.  I think it's a good idea as well.

We would really like to start doing respite for foster families in the area as we think that would be filling a need, and helping ourselves at the same time.

Our social worker also gave us a tickybox questionnaire to fill out.  It has questions about our families, each other, our parenting styles, but it's ALL fill in the boxes.  I'd rather just sit down and go over the questions and chat about the answers.  Ah well.  When we get them finished (it's 11 pages) we will scan and email them off.

We're halfway through the AEP course - there really hasn't been a lot of new information, and the system is sloppy and annoying.  Modules are supposed to close each Sunday, and new ones are supposed to start each Thursday (Except this week - it's "break week"...a complete waste of time) but the system hasn't been opening or closing them at the correct times. 

We are REALLY hoping that our homestudy will be complete by mid February. Our AEP is scheduled to be over in the beginning of December. I still have a funny feeling that we'll have our kids this spring.

Meeting with the Minister of Children and Family Development - Stephanie Cadieux

We and a few other local families were able to meet with the Minister of Children and Families.  We had sent a petition letter (actually over 30 of them) to our local MLA and it turned out Stephanie Cadieux was going to be in the area last Monday.  Our MLA set up a meeting for us, and we were able to bring some of our concerns about wait times and unwritten policies to her attention.  She is very much a politician, and mentioned money several times, but also said that the adoption sector is one that she feels strongly about, and is already looking to make some changes in.  She invited us to share any recommendations we feel would help the process, or to fix problems that are currently on-going.
I wrote a post in our AEP course encouraging all of the participants to contact their MLA's about issues.  I posted our letter for them to use as a template if need be. The more MLA's that are aware (our MLA had no idea it was an issue) of the wait times to get into things like the AEP, or having homestudies done, the more likely change will occur.

This may not help our process and timeline, but in the long run will help get kids into forever homes faster.  In my opinion it should all be about the kids.