Accepted!

It's official!

Dear Andy & Brian:

Open Adoption & Family Services is honored to welcome you into our program. Based on your Application & Intake meeting, it is apparent that your values and expectations for your adoption are well aligned with our commitment to creating healthy open adoption relationships. We feel that you will be a great candidate for our program and look forward to working with you.

We have officially received our acceptance letter from by OA&FS and are on track to continue work to prepare for our second adoption! On Tuesday, Andy and I went over to their office to have our official Intake Interview with our counselor, Katie.  Going through this process for the second time really provides a different perspective.  Compared to the first time we went through and did this interview, it was a lot more relaxed.  The fact that we already know Katie and that she knows us made it incredibly easy.  It has also helped that we have been very active with our agency since adopting Dominic as well.  We have been to two holiday parties (2013 and 2014), I was a guest speaker at one of the pre-adoption seminars, and we also attended their summer picnic back in August.  Sometimes I wonder why I always feel so busy... this might explain a trend.

So why did we have this interview?  OA&FS has every adoptive family go through this interview to make sure they are ready to 'buy in' to the concept of open adoption and that they are a good fit for the agency.  Interviews like this one help protect adoptive parents, birth families, the agency, and especially the children to make sure everyone is committed to working together towards an open adoption.  A few questions we had in our original intake interview which reflect this were:

• How did you decide on adoption?
• How do you feel about openness?
• How and when did each of you decide that you wanted to have children?

This time around, a good chunk of our time with Katie was spent talking about Dominic and our current relationships with his birth parents, Carly and Jason.  Beyond that, there was plenty of talk about personal perspectives, describing our experiences during Dominic's adoption, and what we expect for the second adoption.  (We certainly feel more prepared, but understand every adoption can be different!)

We also spent some time talking about the upcoming process for entering the waiting pool again.  There is still a lot to do (paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork!) which we'll likely touch on in some posts in the coming weeks and months.  Speaking of future posts, there are plenty of other topics we talked about with Katie that we'll be exploring further in depth as well such as:

• Homestudy interviews
• The chance of adopting a baby from another state and how that would be different for us
• The size of the waiting pool
• Preparing our photo book

Overall, we just reached a big milestone in our process, but there's plenty of work left to do.  Thinking about all of this on top of my regular duties at work, I'll be ready for a vacation soon.  Any place that's warm, sunny, and near an ocean sounds just about right. (*hint hint Andy)