busy and a different kind of lost

As if life isn’t hectic enough with simply going to work and feeding ourselves daily, I’ve been keeping quite busy with the many steps we need to take before we are likely to be “matched” with an expectant mother.

First, we survived the frenzy of the home study paperwork and visits (and here). I’m happy to report that our home study was finally forwarded to our agency by our case worker (who is an independent contractor). She had hoped to finish it a week earlier, but could not. Now, we wait for the agency to review the report and send it to us before it is finalized. We expect the home study to be complete within the next couple of weeks, which will mark just over three months since we first applied in June. 

Next, we focus on our adoption profile and materials. I think I mentioned that we opted out of our agency’s outreach program (with its 70 waiting families), and signed with a private consultant who specializes in open adoption (with maybe 20 waiting families). The catch is we are responsible for much of our own outreach. So we will re-direct a significant chunk of funds that would have otherwise gone to our agency, which has about a two-year wait. Undertaking our own outreach is both daunting and empowering, for anyone wondering. 

I’ve already alluded to how unique our consultant is. So we have to do things a little differently than other would-be adoptive parents, and every detailed step takes time… 

We’ve also been trying to educate ourselves as much as possible about this process and about forming healthy relationships through open adoption. We want to be as prepared as possible, though we realize that nothing can truly prepare us, short of real life experience. So we’re doing what we can — attending meetings and workshops, reading a lot of books, articles and blogs, and talking to as many people as possible about their experience with open adoption. 

Aside from documenting our busywork, I thought some of you might appreciate hearing about some recent activities to give you a sense of what we’ve been up to lately…

• attended the first of four agency workshops in a series on “preparing for adoption” 
• attended a support group meeting for “waiting” families at what used to be the Resolve office (but missed the second one because we were so tired from the late workshop the night before)
• attended monthly support meetings with our consultant and her past and present clients; heard from and talked with waiting and adoptive families and birth parents
• read 5 books on open adoption; future post on this coming soon…
• drafted our initial one page letter and selected photos
• drafted our more detailed profile and selected photos
• now editing the text for our website, the length of which is in between the two letters above (and much harder for some reason)
• compiled our photo album (with i-photo) which will be shared when we are “matched” (this was actually really fun!)
• hired a graphic designer to help with our profile materials (because as I said we have to do things differently); consulting about the design should begin in about a week
• hired a web designer to help our website look professional and to optimize linkages (because the version I did with i-web just won’t cut it); consulting about design will begin once the letters are done
• got an 800# and domain name for the website
• got my haircut and made a date with M to take some good photos this weekend for The One that will lead in our materials; we have a ton of pix of us, but not The One…
• collected some more books for the baby bookshelf!
• and finally, successfully distracted ourselves by watching every single episode of this show — four seasons in two months (is that a record?), or 82 episodes of 42 minutes each, for a total of 57.4 hours (plus extras!), in about 90-minute late night increments. I know it sounds crazy, but we really got sucked in after avoiding the show for years, and now we have to wait for January for the new season to begin but we will definitely not be able to watch with commercials and week-long breaks in between… this was real “TV crack” — anyone else addicted? 

~ by luna on September 19, 2008.