Just waiting for the phone to ring

The adoption process through the county is often a long, involved time period in which you and your spouse have to prove that your home is safe and so are you to have children. While we intellectually understand the need for a unified level for all people applying to foster/adopt children, it didn't change the emotional feelings we felt during this time. It didn't matter that we had a home (one we actually own) , were educated, each had longevity in our jobs and support from our families. In this part of the journey to become parents we had to be willing to open ourselves up to reveal medical, financial, and other needed information.

Not wanting to drag out the process over 8-10 months, which is the average time is takes to complete everything, we became our own advocates and pushed through. We attended the orientation meeting on December 7, 2005, almost 1 year to the date of our initial diagnosis. We filled out the application and left it with the social worker at the meeting. We knew we wanted to go forward and we didn't want to slow down the process any more than it already was going to be! We received a phone call while we were on vacation in Maui at the end of December that we had been assigned a social worker.

We met with Charlene the first week in January and she provided us with a thick packet of things to do. We got started right away and made this adoption process our number one priority. That meant that we spent the rest of January getting our medical forms completed (thanks Tamar!) and writing our autiobiographies. They ended up to be about 14 typed pages each in response to questions we were asked to think about. Things like what our childhood was like, a crisis we remember in our childhood, our relationship then and now with our parents and our siblings, our parenting philiosphy, who will care for the child etc. We had to be fingerprinted but it had to be done at their offices during specific times. We had to do two sets... one for foster care and one for adoption. We had to become CPR certified. There are no costs involved with the county but a lot of time and a lot of paperwork!

We also had to attend almost 39 hours of parenting classes. These are the basis for foster care with some of it being applicable to to adoption. Classes met twice a week for 3 hours over a 6 week period. We learned to take the things that applied to us and our situation and leave the rest at the door. The classes helped us realize that we really want to adopt children and not foster them at this time. It also helped us consider issues such as bonding and attachment and how it might be more difficult with a toddler than an infant.

The other part of this process was going to a foster care orientation, having a home visit by a foster care license worker, individual interviews with our social worker, and a home visit with our social worker. We have decided to pursue concurrent adoption which means that children whoose parents do meet the reunification plans will be moved into the adoption path. Concurrent planning is when the children are still in foster care and waiting for the hearing to terminate parental rights to make them adoptable. The goal is to have the children placed once instead of waiting 6 months in one foster care home and then moved into an adoptive home. Thus, the reason we needed a foster care license.

Our social worker visited our home on March 30, 2006. We discussed the type of child/children we would be willing to adopt. What ethnicity would we consider? What types of issues would we consider? Neglect? Failure to Thrive? Mental Illness in parents? Unknown parents? What drug effects would we be willing to deal with? Alcohol? No. Crystal Meth? Drug of choice in San Diego. Marijuana? Yes. Age of children? Under 2... the younger the better. Gender preference? No. Siblings? Yes. The list goes on and on and on. and then it was over and we began our wait.

We are in our sixth month of waiting since that interview. Probably the 5th month since we were actually put into the system with a written home study. Our social worker felt it would be around 6 months before we were "pulled from the drawer" as potential matches for children. So we are approaching that general time frame and literally just waiting for the phone to ring. It could come tomorrow. It could come next week. It could come next month. It could come next year. The only thing we do know is that that phone call will change our lives forever.