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.