Homestudy Interview #1

After a great weekend in Providence, RI with Josh, Elise, and Cora, we came back to Seattle for our first homestudy interview with our counselor, Katie, on Monday morning.  Given that we wanted to put on a good show, Andy and I did a fair amount of cleaning before we left town for the weekend, after getting home close to midnight on Sunday, and then some last minute work before our 9:30am meeting.

So, how did it go?  Our home has been stamped with approval and is safe for children!  (For those of you that have asked already, you already know this as I've been enjoying passing on the fact that our house is surprisingly not a death trap.  Go us!)  Amusingly, Katie was at our condo for about 2 hours and we spent the majority of the time in our living room just talking through some of the basic interview questions that she had.  One of the primary purposes of the homestudy meetings is to learn more about us.  Katie will write a 10+ page homestudy report that will tell potential birthfamilies all about who we are and what our home is like.

Katie led us through some basic 'get-to-know-you' questions to help get that ball rolling.  We talked about each of our typical days at work, what we do during the evenings, our weekend hobbies, and how some of those things may change after we have a baby.  For example, I know my 3x a week gym schedule will be converted from running and weight lifting to bouncing a baby and lifting loaded diapers!

After our extended chat, we led Katie on a tour of our house which turned out to be really laid back and easy.  She was rather impressed with our awesome evacuation plan (yeah!) and it didn't take long for her to fire through her checklist and give us a stamp of approval.

Even though this was just the first of four interviews, it felt great to get all of that completed and out of the way.  I know I had been carrying some stress about this meeting even though I was 99% sure we'd pass through with flying colors.  With this one done, here's a check-in on our process:

• Application & Intake Interview
• Homestudy Interview #1 - April 9th
• Homestudy Interview #2 - April 11th  April 25th  (Just rescheduled today)
• Homestudy Interview #3 - April 23rd 
• Homestudy Interview #4 - April 25th

As mentioned in previous posts, two of the interviews will take place at our condo and involve both Andy and myself.  The other two will be individual interviews with Katie.  Interviews #1 and #3 are the joint interviews at our condo.  Interviews #2 and #4 are individual one-on-one meetings at Katie's office - one for me and one for Andy.  These will both be on the 25th so that means "Interview #3" at our condo is up next on the 23rd.  Until then, we'll have some fun posts to entertain you before a flurry of updates during the week of the 23rd.  Stay tuned!

Visiting Cora Ann

What a great weekend! Brian and I got to go to Providence, RI, this weekend to visit my brother Josh and sister-in-law Elise, and to meet their adorable 2-month-old daughter Cora Ann! My younger brother Matt made the trip from Seattle at the same time, so we had a great "brothers' reunion" as well. Thanks Josh and Elise for being such wonderful hosts, even as parents of a newborn!

And without further ado, the pictures :)

Meeting Cora for the first time

Aunt Meghan and Daddy entertain Cora

It was hard to get a good picture of both Elise and Cora at the same time - so here's Cora looking at the camera!

And now we've got Elise too :)

Uncle Brian was a natural with Cora

Crazy Bird is really crazy!

Uncle Matt, Cora, and a gas station. Yes, this happened.

Not quite sure about this whole stroller thing.

Almost caught the smile on camera! Instead, got the "Magee eyebrow raise".

Post-bath monkey towel!

Uncle Brian and Cora

Hiccups are cute!

Talking about Adoption

I'm never one to shy away from a pedantic discussion about semantics, so I really liked the following passage in one of the open adoption books I'm reading:

Adoption is a process. We advocate that the process be kept distinct from the person who is the adoptee. On the simplest level this means preferring "Betsy was adopted" to "Betsy is an adopted child." The first (Betsy was adopted) correctly describes a single and past event in her life. This is no different from a birthmother proud of the experience of giving birth describing to another, "I had my son by cesarean birth." The same birthmother would not refer to that child after the event as "my cesarean son."

By contrast, "Betsy is an adopted child" or even "Betsy is special because she is adopted" conveys an ongoing significance to the state of being adopted. This is potentially dangerous because of the subtle implication that adopted children are somehow different from natural children who do not have labels attached to them. In addition, if Betsy is described as "special" or "chosen," that means someone is less special or valuable as a person. If Betsy is not a "natural child" that makes her "unnatural" or at least not normal. Do these labels all mean that at one point Betsy was not so special because she was not wanted?

Excerpt from Dear Birthmother by Kathleen Silber and Phylis Speedlin, Third Edition, Page 141

This hit home, especially in light of a conversation we just had with my sister-in-law Elise earlier tonight. She expressed the thought that she sometimes was afraid to bring up an adoption-related question or topic because she didn't know the right verbiage for it and was afraid of saying something unintentionally offensive. I can sympathize with that - I feel like we've learned an entirely new vocabulary since we started working with our agency!

I totally get the above quotes from Dear Birthmother, and on the one hand I agree with the sentiment. Our child will be our child, end of story, regardless of how our family is formed. That fact that we will form our family through adoption won't make a difference in how much we love our child, and so describing the fact of the adoption as a discrete event rather than as a characteristic of the child seems right.

On the other hand, the difference between "Betsy was adopted" (as a past tense verb) and "Besty is adopted" (as a present tense verb and adjective) is so slight that I think most people wouldn't even hear the difference. In fact, in the extreme case, the contraction "Betsy's adopted" could really represent either version. Making such a subtle distinction also seems like it's a pretty difficult task, and one we could easily make mistakes on all the time.

Don't you just love semantics?

Alright, that's enough thinking for now - better go off to bed before my head explodes. Next up (hopefully tomorrow) I'll try to post pictures from our visit to Rhode Island with Josh, Elise, and baby Cora!

Do You Have a Home Evacuation Plan?

On Monday we have Katie (our counselor from OA&FS) coming to our house for our first home visit. Needless to say, we've been cleaning up like freaks and trying to make sure everything's in tip-top shape! That giant hole our cats clawed out of the sofa? All patched up :)

In addition to just making sure we've cleaned everything up, the agency prepared us by sending along the checklist of things they have to verify for legal reasons. Most are common sense items, such as:

• The home has safe drinking water.
• Smoke alarms are in working order and located in every room in which a child sleeps.
• Swimming pools, wading pools, hot tubs, and other water hazards are inaccessible to children.

All those requirements? We're golden. We had to do a little bit of work for some of them (we didn't actually have a fire extinguisher, for instance), but they generally all made sense. One of them really came out of nowhere, though:

• The home has a posted home evacuation plan. It will be shared with the child or young adult at the time of placement and will be practiced at least one time every 6 months.

I mean... really? Because it's so difficult to just walk out the door? And we're definitely going to make our newborn do fire drills every six months - I'm sure they'll be really useful. Anyway, this is when it's useful that I'm married to a civil engineer. Brian and CAD to the rescue!

He missed a closet in the bedroom...

I can rest easy now that I know where to go in case of emergency!

Summer's Here!

The baby, that is, not the season.

Our good friends Tatiana and Mike welcomed their daughter Summer back in January, and we were finally able to go and visit them this weekend! Summer's now a whole 2 months old, so we waited far too long for a visit. On the upside, she's aware enough that we were able to capture her attention for at least a few seconds at a time!

Summer came early this year!

Unfortunately, Summer started crying the moment I picked her up. Tatiana was kind enough to teach me her "swinging" trick, so I was able to get her to calm down at least for a bit. And Brian even got her to fall asleep in his arms! We'll be old pros at this in no time flat...