Adoption Training

Jason and I attended the 8 hour adoption training today at Hope Cottage. Some of it was very informative while some of it was a good reminder of things that we have already started learning. One of the aspects that I appreciated most was the sobering reality of the grieving process that the birth parents experience as well as the grieving adopted kids experience over the missed relationship with their birth parents. In the training they said that adoption is often the best choice a birth parent has, but that there are still far-reaching implications. They said that adoption is born out of loss, and so with that come some hard realities.

One of the highlights was getting to meet an adoptive mom and baby and hearing their story. The mom was obviously a believer and referenced her faith and prayer life often as she spoke of her journey with adoption.

Something that the director clarified for us today is that while they are currently working with 20 moms, several of those through counseling will choose to parent their child themselves. Of those 20 moms they expect that roughly five or so will make an adoption plan. Last fall and winter Hope Cottage had an abundance of deliveries that allowed them to make placements for almost all of their waiting families. As of now they just have 1 waiting family, and they are in desperate need of families. In fact, they have one baby that was born a few weeks ago that they are still trying to place. For whatever reason the one waiting family they have is not a compatible match, and so they are hoping that one of the three of us couples who went through training today will be ready to take that baby in the next month. Their average wait time for their adoptive families right now is about 2 1/2 months. The home study will take place over the course of at least 3 weeks. One week they will come and interview Jason. Another week they will interview me. The third week they will sit down with all 4 of us for an interview.

Once we pass the home study and are approved for adoption, we will submit a profile. The profile resembles a mini-scrapbook. It contains a letter to the birthparents to tell them how we will care for their child as well as pictures of us, our home, different aspects of our life. They will call us before they show our profile to a birth mom to give us some specifics to her situation and ask if we are comfortable with letting her see our profile- so at that point if they know that there had been some drug use or alcohol consumption during pregnancy we would need to evaluate if that is something we are comfortable with. If the birth mom chooses our profile then they will set up a match meeting for us to meet each other. It seems comparable to a blind date. If we decide to go forward with the match then we could start to discuss details such as whether or not we could be at the hospital for the birth, etc.

Other topics that were covered today were open v. closed adoption, transracial adoption, the legal process, positive verbage for talking about adoption, and much much more. If you are curious about any of that please don't hesitate to ask! I think I will wrap up this post for now. Thanks again for your prayers for our family as we are on this journey!