Another Meeting and a New Direction

    At the end of last week we met with two fine folks from Guidestone, one we had met before and the other, a supervisor, was new to us.  During our discussion we determined that the types of children and level of disability that we had specified in our original application to Belmont County were acceptable to Guidestone and they felt that they had children in their care that would fit that description.  This was important to both of us but especially to me because I didn’t want to feel pressured to take in children that were more difficult than we had planned.    With this understanding we felt that we should continue toward our re-certification with Guidestone.

    Despite our new understanding regarding the type of children that we could expect, there was one new wrinkle.  Local county agencies refer children to Guidestone when they have children that are technically “more difficult.”   Although this still fits our original description, we now will have to upgrade our foster home certification to be a “therapeutic foster home” instead of a “family foster home.”  What that means is another twenty hours of training.   

Yippee…

Not much to report today except that the new agency that we are considering, Guidestone, has received copies of all of our paperwork from Belmont County (at least as much as they are allowed to copy) and is will be visiting us later this week.  I guess we'll see how many thing will need to be re-done and if that list is longer or shorter than the list that we had from Stark County.  The process is taking longer than I thought that it would but on the other hand, my pessimistic side suspected that moving would throw a wrench into the works and might take six months to work out.  Still, even then I though that it might be six months before we had a child placed in our home, not that it would take six months to satisfy the paper tigers.

Hopefully, I will have more news next week...

First Impressions

    It’s been too long since I wrote anything here.  A couple weeks ago we attended a training session mandated by our new county.  Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I had expected.  The staff and the other families were as nice as I anyone could have asked for, but that wasn’t really the problem.  If we back up another week we encounter the problem.  Before we left Belmont County we completed all of the training required by them and by the State of Ohio and were certified as foster parents.  We understood that, since we would be in a new home, we would need to have another home visit and another fire inspection.  The problem is that when we contacted our new county agency, we were told that we would also have to take several additional classes, rewrite our home-study and provide copies of the home-studies that were done for our first two adoptions thirteen and fifteen years ago. 

    We’ve all heard about first impressions and these were not good ones.  We weren’t too happy about some of the new requirements and wished them luck with the last one.  We sure don’t have copies of our old home-studies (or if we do they are buried so deep in our box pile they may not be found until our children go sort through our stuff when they put me in a nursing home), I’m not sure the agencies that wrote them retain records that long, and at least one of the social workers that wrote them died ten years ago.

   As I said, we went to the first class the new agency required and it wasn’t bad.  It was all about the rules they expected us to follow.  Many rules were the same as Belmont County, some were new and a few were just explained better.  Some of the things that we learned weren’t especially welcome.  The county was fairly clear that although you have the chance to express your preferences, when they select you for a particular foster child you may not get the chance to review their file first and it would count against you (as in, it would impact your ability to be offered foster children in the future) if you refused a child that was offered.  One other item did not go over especially well with us.  Our new county requires an exclusivity agreement.  If anyone is certified by them they insist upon exclusive “rights” to them as foster parents for a minimum of one year.  If you choose to change agencies in less than one year, the (taxpayer supported, public) agency will bill you for the expenses they incurred in getting your certification.  We thought this was unusual and we mentioned it to a couple other social workers that we know.  Neither had ever heard of such a thing.  Again, not a great first impression.

    Surprisingly, at the same time that we were discussing these negative first impressions, I had a surprise visitor at my office at church.  A representative from Guidestone, a private foster care/adoption agency stopped by the church to meet the new pastor (me) and to see if she could come and speak for a few minutes about their agency some Sunday morning.  Since Guidestone is essentially an agency of the United Methodist Church, this was a reasonable request.  The surprising thing was the timing.  My wife and I had already discussed the possibility of meeting with them to discuss options particularly because of our first impressions at our county agency.  The end result has been that we’ve deliberately slowed the pace of re-certification with the county (since we don’t want to have to pay them for their services if we choose to go elsewhere) and we are looking more deeply into what it would take to re-certify with Guidestone instead.

    All in all, the process is taking longer than we thought it would, is more difficult that it ought to be, and now we are not so sure that foster care is something we want to pursue long-term.  Instead we are feeling that foster-to-adopt as a deliberate path to adoption may be the best course for us.   The adventure continues…

Did Advertising Influence our Decsion to Adopt?

    For some time now I have been following the Twitter feed of AdoptUSKids and before that I would occasionally drift back to their website (www.adoptuskids.org) and page through the photo listings of the children who were available for adoption and who are just waiting for a family to call their own.  The state of Ohio (and most other states) has a similar list (http://www.adoptionphotolistingohio.org) that I also have spent time paging through.  In both of these lists I have been overcome by the sheer number of children.  When looking at photographs and biographies of these children I have just had to stop when I realized that there were 260 pages to look at, each with 15 photographs and some of those were sibling groups and not just one child.  To get my hands around these numbers I made regular use of the search tools to filter the search results using all sorts of criteria.  I’ve searched by state, by gender, by race, by age, and I would have searched using other criteria if could.  For obvious reasons of safety and privacy the general public cannot search using religion or other personal information.  Once our homestudy is complete and in our hands (which should be any day now), we can register with AdoptUSKids and gain access to additional information about the children we are interested in.  At this point, I am uncertain just how much information will be made available to us when that happens.

    This week Adopt US Kids tweeted this question, “Did a TV, radio or print ad influence our decision to adopt?” and asked folks to share their stories through www.humaninterestfilms.com.  As I explained in my blog post, Why Now?, we always thought we’d have more children but, for a variety of reasons, the time was never right, until now.  For some time, years in fact, whenever things would begin to look like our lives might be making a way for us to think about kids again, I would find myself returning to the photo listings and imagining what it would be like to add another child to our family or what sort of child would fit our already quirky collective.  When we finally made the decision to get serious about adopting again, we were still looking at the photo lists and each week when AdoptUSKids would tweet a new pair of featured children, I would click on the link and have a look.

    So did a TV, radio or print ad influence our decision to adopt?  Well, it probably wasn’t TV or radio, and we didn’t see too many ads in the newspaper, but the Internet had a lot to do with keeping us connected and sustaining our interest in adoption.  It hasn’t happened yet of course.  We expect to receive our completed homestudy in the next two weeks (and then get it revised after we move) and then we will see where the road takes us.   Whatever happens, the State of Ohio, AdoptUSKids, Twitter, and others have certainly had some influence on getting us to this place.

Countdown

    We are coming to the end of two separate countdowns.  First is our upcoming move.  With only five days left to pack before we leave for our church's Annual Conference and then moving day only two days after our return, we're trying to get everything done before Saturday.  So far we've taken three trailer loads of stuff to the new house and my wife has planted some tomato plants (at the new place).  My office is packed, and several rooms at home are completed (or nearly so).  This week is the final push and then when we return from conference we can finish up a (hopefully) few final details.

    The second countdown is toward finishing our homestudy.  Today Jennifer returned for her third (and possibly final) visit to our home  - despite the chaos and boxes everywhere - to meet our children and to interview them.  This was their big chance to speak their minds about how they felt about us inviting foster children into our home or if they had feelings about having a new, forever family, brother or sister.  Since I wasn't needed for this interview I stayed at work trying to wrap up details here.  From what I've heard so far, the only concern was that if we had more kids, we might not have enough money.  From our kids perspective, we're poor, because we won't buy them all the toys and gadgets that their friends have (and which, in their minds, we ought to have too).  In reality, although we're not rich, we are certainly not poor.  We have enough for what we need even though we know that getting kids through college in a few years is going to be more than a little challenging.

    It seems that we are on target to get our move done at the end of the month and also that on moving day we will take with us a completed homestudy.  At least that is our hope and that is what we are praying for.  At the risk of repeating myself, once we are settled into our new home, we will then contact Children's Services in our new county to update the homestudy and we should be ready to go wherever this crazy adventure is leading us.

Second homestudy visit/thoughts on "The Process"

    Yesterday, we had our second visit by our social worker, Jennifer.  Once again we answered a bunch of questions but, again, none of them seemed to be terribly intrusive (more on that later).  We answered questions, filled out a few new forms and we gave Jennifer a copy of our floor plan/fire escape plan as well as our fire inspection that we completed last week.  After completing the paperwork portion of our meeting we gave her a brief tour of our home despite the boxes and ongoing evidence of packing for the move to our new home at the end of June (only four weeks left to pack - Yikes!).

    The first time that we had a homestudy, probably fifteen or sixteen years ago, I remember thinking that the process seemed extraordinarily intrusive.  I remember thinking that many of the questions seemed very personal and that I was very uncomfortable giving out highly detailed private financial information.  A decade and a half later it doesn't seem to be that big a deal but I am not entirely sure why.  I suppose that, in part, as a society we have become accustomed to having a little less privacy than we once did.  Combine that with out constant exposure to Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, text messages and other immediate news sources we, perhaps, feel that more people already know an awful lot about us and our private lives.  Mostly, however, I think it is simply that while fifteen years ago we had never given that sort of information out to anyone but our closest family (especially financial information) but in the intervening years we have given this information out many times for unemployment benefits, Medicaid benefits (while unemployed and underemployed), applications for state funded subsidies for counseling related to Reactive Attachment Disorder, financial aid applications, and employment related background checks.  While I am still not a big fan of giving someone (anyone) a detailed list of our assets and income, it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it did the first time.

    Still, be forewarned, if you are thinking of adopting or getting licensed for foster care, or if you have already begun that process, you will be asked to give out information about yourself that you may never have given out to anyone, even your parents or closest friends.  For us, it was not, and is not, a deal killer.  Uncomfortable?  Yes.  But the folks at Children's Services are decent, trustworthy people.  They have a real "need to know" this kind of stuff and they do a good job of keeping your private information private.  If I were you, I wouldn't let a little discomfort stop me from attaining one of life's most worthwhile goals.

    Trust me, despite all of the hassles and difficulties we've had raising our three kids over the last fifteen years, and despite all the trips to see counselors (and doctors, and orthodontists, etc.) there is nothing that I wouldn't do over again in a heartbeat.  Our kids are so awesome, and I am so proud of them, that I can never express it adequately in words.  If you are thinking of adoption, or if you have already started, do not let the process prevent you from reaching your goal.

Press on.

Persevere.

It will all be worth it in the end.

Homestudy News

    This week has been busy for us as we continue to pack but also to clean so that we can complete several tours and inspections that are needed for a variety of reasons.  First, we invited Ted, the pastor that will succeed me after we leave, and his family to come on Monday to have lunch, tour the house and to meet some of the teachers and coaches that will be important in their daughter’s life next year.  On Tuesday Jennifer, our social worker from Children’s Services, visited us to begin our homestudy and then in the afternoon our local fire chief stopped by to complete the fire inspection for our homestudy.  We still anticipate one more visit from the church trustees as they look over the house before we change pastors so that we can discuss what maintenance issues might need to be addressed as a part of the transition and in the coming months.

    We have also learned that most of our references have completed the required paperwork and have returned it to Jennifer.  All this means that so far, we are on track to complete our homestudy before we move to Stark County.  Again, our hope is that instead of starting over with a new county, this means that we will be able to simply ask Stark County to update our homestudy to reflect our new address (which of course will mean a visit from a new social worker as well as a new fire inspection), new church and new school.  All in all, still a complicated process but probably less than trying to start over again from square one.

    Tomorrow, we have to go to Cleveland Clinic for a check-up, to Akron for a funeral and to Newcomerstown for our district track meet.  Next week, Jennifer will come again for another visit, the first of the moving companies will come to give us an estimate, the kids will have their last day of school, and our daughter will run in the regional track meet.  I’m afraid that our lives will be lived at pretty much a dead run until after we move and maybe until school starts again in the fall.  In any case, hopefully by the time school starts we will be fully 'homestudied' and ready to bring home a new family member!  

That is still a both exciting and terrifying idea.  Change doesn't come easily to any of us and our family has been constant at the five of us for almost fourteen years.  I keep thinking of a line from the "Little Rascals" television show many years ago when the kid's coaster car was careening wildly down a gigantic hill.  In the midst of their excitement and fear, Stymie said, "I don't know where we're going, but we're on our way!"  I can relate.