Approaching Splash Zone

After months of preparations, we're nearly in the waiting pool!  In total, we have provided all of our materials to the agency and checked off every box on our list as of Thursday last week.  The only thing left is for OA&FS to handle the internal paperwork before we're in the waiting pool.  I have my fingers crossed that this will happen by the end of May (this week), but it could potentially be further out than that.

How could it take so long to process our paperwork after months and months of prep?  If you're asking that (hi mom!), you're probably not alone.  I have that thought crop up from time to time, but then I remember what the agency's priorities are.  Getting families into the waiting pool is very important to them.  However, many of their staff and counselors need to drop what they're working on when placements happen.  Speaking from past experience, when we went through Dominic's placement, that was the time that it mattered most to have support from the agency!  The engineer in me wants a hard and fast deadline for pool entry, but I keep telling myself that it'll happen when it happens.

A freakin turret!

In the meantime, May has mostly been a month filled with various projects and the relief of not having adoption "homework" hanging over my head most nights after work.  We have made a lot of fun trips to the park with Dominic now that the weather is getting nicer.  I've been training with actual consistency for a half-marathon next month, and we have also been working on Dominic's new bedroom!  Eventually, Dominic will move to the bedroom next to his and his room will switch over to the baby room.  (We might have decided it was easier to redo an entire bedroom for him rather than take apart the crib.)  One of things we did for that new bedroom was to make an IKEA run to get some shelves and bins for the closet.  While we were there, we bought lots of frivolous things that seemed like fun: a mini-chair and table set for Dominic, lingonberries for me, and a turret.  Yeah, that's right.  We bought a freakin turret!  Best $20 we ever spent.


For now, no other notable updates on the adoption front.  We're still at a similar point to last time, but I need to drive this story into the ground like I'm a one-man-CNN.  BREAKING NEWS - ALMOST NOTHING NEW HAS HAPPENED!  But seriously, something is about to happen.  When?  Who knows.  I'm tempted to speculate on it....but I won't.  You will all just have to look forward to our next post  :)

Waiting Pool or Bust!

This is almost like our checklist...

It's been an incredibly busy April for us.  I've been juggling one deadline at work after another, my parents came out to visit, and we've also been working towards the last few checklist items to complete before we get into the waiting pool.

The last two items we've had to complete have been the Family Introduction Letter and the Family Book.  These two things are the most important pieces of our preparations to enter the waiting pool.  They are the first things birth families see when looking at potential adoptive families for their child.  (No pressure!)

What is a Family Introduction Letter?

When you visit the profiles of families in the waiting pool, the text on their profile page is the Family Introduction Letter.  In essence, it's like reading the first page in a new book or the opening of a 60-minute presentation.  The good Family Introduction Letters get your attention and make you interested to read more.  They make you feel connected to the people that wrote them while also giving a good sense of who they are, what they value, and what sort of parents they would become (or are).  On some levels, this is really tough because you get 1 page to cram a giant pile of information into place while also making it seem light and effortless and fun.

Family Book....that sounds like a novel.  Did you write War and Peace or something?

Oh my god it felt like it.  This one was incredibly tough for us to make as it was brand new and was not something we prepared for our last adoption.  The Family Intro Letter seems like a piece of cake as it's condensed down into a neat little 1 page package.  This behemoth took us over a month to pull together.

The Family Book is a 20-30 page book filled with photos and text.  You know how people make cute little photo books on Shutterfly or Snapfish that show off pictures of their weddings or vacations?  Yeah, those books are easy.  Hell, someone could pick up a pile of 100 vacation pictures, shove it into one of those sites, and it will spit out an entire book in 60 seconds.  

I may be exaggerating a bit, but the Family Book is something that, for us, required a lot of thought, preparation, rifling through thousands of pictures, and the entire month of April.  The hardest part was just building an outline and a base of pictures that started to help it all make sense.  Until that happened, it was like having the same piece of homework every night after work and never making any progress, but in the end we crammed in 87 pictures, 67 text boxes, and far too many customized layouts later we have a drafted copy of this ready to go!

What Next?

We sent drafts of both the Letter and the Book to our counselor, Katie, just last night.  Earlier today we heard that she's headed out on vacation for a few days (lucky for her!), but that we'll hear back in a week as this will be at the top of her list.  We'll likely have some tweaks to take care of and then after that we'll have these finalized and ready for production.  The only other big items out there are for Katie to finish up our homestudy report and for us to send in a big fat check to the agency to cover pool entry/marketing.  Barring any issues, we could be in the waiting pool by the end of May!

Pictures on the Fridge

Last week, we put up a whole bunch of pictures on the fridge. Brian and I have been saying for a while that we want more photos of our family and friends

around where Dominic can see them, but we just hadn't gotten around to it. So over the weekend I got a bunch of magnetic sleeves, had some prints made, and voilà! Instant portraits for Dominic.

And wow, were they a hit. Without fail, every morning since then the first thing he does after coming downstairs is to run to the fridge and start pointing at all the people. He loves it! I was surprised by how much he enjoys looking at all the pictures, and also at how well he can identify everyone. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends - he knows every name, and can even say some of them!

One of the reasons we chose to pursue open adoption was that we wanted our children to know where they came from, and to be able to have a relationship with their birth families. To that end, we've seen Dominic's birth family a number of times over the past year and a half, and I'm confident we'll continue on that route throughout the course of Dominic's life. But the kid's only 17 months old - I assumed that even though he's seen his birth family often, he didn't yet understand who they were. Surprisingly, the fridge has proven me wrong.

Dominic's birth parents are both on our fridge, and somehow Dominic already knew who they were without us having to prompt him at all! He can identify them by both name and relationship: when I say "Carly" or "birth mom", and "Jason" or "birth dad," he knows them both. And he smiles when he points to them, but there's one other picture that he gets even more excited about: the one of him with his birth brother Mickee. I guess he knows a cute picture when he sees it!

We spent a lot of time during adoption preparation worrying about how we'd interact with a birth family. And we still worry about it sometimes; any human relationship has to be approached with care and sincerity. But it's nice to know that at least for now, things seem to be off to a good start!

Waiting Pool - April Stats

It's a new month which means that it's time for a fresh round of stats!

After some graphs showing some less than exciting changes in the pool over the last month, time for a new chart!  Now that we're going through the pool a second time, we have an entirely new perspective considering that our family is different from so many others in the pool.  We have already tracked waiting families by orientation, but this time around it made sense to do a quick look to see how many other families have children as well.

As shown above, only 17 families out of the 94 total have children right now.  Each birthfamily will look at the available waiting families differently.  Some might want to choose a family without kids while others might choose an adoptive family with kids to guarantee that the child will grow up with at least one sibling.  Admittedly, we're hoping for a family with the latter perspective or one that is open to either case!

Homestudy and Transracial Adoption

In February, we had all of our homestudy meetings with our counselor, Katie.  We also turned in a giant pile of paperwork...

Office Kitty is not impressed with our papers

...recorded a video of the two of us that will go online with our profile where we answered the typical questions of "What do you like about your spouse?" and "Why does openness appeal to you?"...

Oh dear god, never do an image search on "openness."  Kids, the internets are scary.

...and then we also talked a lot with Katie about some major adoption topics like transracial adoption, attachment, and exposures.  Since we have plenty of time coming up and will review some of these later, I'll keep this focused on transracial adoption.

What does transracial adoption actually mean?
It's a fancy term for when you adopt a child of a race different from your own.  For us, Andy and I are both white.  A transracial adoption for us means that we could be adopting a child that is hispanic, asian, african american, etc.  The end result is that the child may look obviously different from us.  Looking at our first child, Dominic is a white baby that easily fits into the societal mold where people can easily assume that we are his parents.

With two dads and an old brother that are white, some of these kids might look the same as us while others would look different and be confusing to people that don't know our family

Even the folks from Avenue Q tell us that our family
will be judged at least a little bit whether we're a
transracial family or if we're all white

One point that really stuck out the most to me is that our future family could all be together in one place (Andy, myself, Dominic, and a future little brother or sister), and someone walks up and talks to Dominic about his "friend".  Thinking about how we perceive families, typically a child that looks different would normally be a friend or relative rather than part of the family.  It's something that would come up over and over again: at the grocery store, at security with TSA when we fly anywhere, on the playground, at school, and many other instances.  These are situations where adoptive parents and children are outside of societal norms and need to educate those around them.  For our family, we're already a little unique and adding one more layer of depth to our family isn't really that big of a deal to us!

So looking ahead, where are we at in the process?

Information Meeting

Pre-Adoption Seminar

Application Submission

Application & Intake Interview

Homestudy Interview #1

Homestudy Interview #2

Homestudy Interview #3

Homestudy Interview #4

Homestudy Completion

Pool Entry

Waiting in the Pool [0 months to 2+ years]

Chosen by Birthfamily

We're moving right along!  There are still several weeks of wrapping up our homestudy and getting background checks done by the FBI.  Beyond that, we also need to write and prepare all of our materials for our online profile for the OA&FS website.  Still a fair amount of work left, but we're likely less than 3 months away from the pool and should be "swimming" with Charley the Waiting pool whale again before summer starts!