Clearly, I have a bit of free time. Two blog posts in two days. In an attempt to procrastinate writing the rest of my report cards, I thought I would give everyone a small update. Small, because not much has happened since the last time we were presented. However, on Monday, two adoption related things did happen.
First of all, we had to have another home visit. Every six months, someone from our adoption agency has to come out and check out our house (mostly just check to see if our fire detectors still work) in order to keep up our DCFS licensing. It used to be that these home visits totally freaked me out. I would worry about if the dog would behave (she rarely does) and I would worry about if the house was clean enough (it rarely isn't). However, like everything else in this process, we are starting to get used to the home visits. They no longer hold the same kind of power that they used to. They no longer inspire fear in me. They do inspire me to clean the house (which was handy since we are having Thanksgiving at our house this year) and they do inspire us to stock up on chewy things to keep the dog occupied. All went well. The home visit itself only took a few minutes and it was done. Fire detectors work. The house is still well-suited to raise a child in. Our pets are still overly friendly to all who enter our home. So now we have another six months until we have to do another home visit. That means another six months until the basement floors get a good mopping!
In addition to the home visit on Monday, we also met our new adoption counselor. The counselor who has been with us since the beginning of our work with our agency has been reassigned to a different department. She will now be working on the post-adoption side of things. So on Monday, she came to our house with our new adoption counselor who seems very nice. While I have not always seen eye-to-eye with our first adoption counselor, it was a little sad to leave the comfort that we had established with her. I am sure that we will attain that level of comfort with our new counselor, but I also know that it will take some time. One of the nicest things about the meeting was that we got a chance to hear from our first adoption counselor how much she really liked us. I often wondered what she really thought of us, because she is a hard lady to read. But, it was really nice to hear the things that she told our new counselor about the kind of couple that we are. So now, I look forward to working with our new counselor and hope that she will be the one that is with us until the end.
So that is it. That's the only update that we have for now. It has actually been really nice to not have a lot of activity right now. It has been nice to return to the normal kind of waiting. It has been nice to be able to return to the kind of waiting that allows you to almost forget, though not entirely, that you are waiting. It is nice to have a chance to focus instead on cooking Thanksgiving lunch, which is an entirely different kind of challenging.
Hi there, we are starting the process to adopt in another state. However, we wondering if you knew how dogs were considered? We have one who is overly friendly and another who doesn't like people besides us. It's our concern during the home visit how the one who doesn't like people would affect our outcome...
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for asking! Good luck with all that goes along with the home study phase of the adoption process. Feel free to ask anything that might come up along the way!
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, our dog was the one thing that I found the most stressful about the whole situation. My advice would be to do what you normally do when people come to the house. For us, that meant that the first time our counselor came, we were armed with a whole lot of dog treats to keep the dog busy and then after that we usually had the dog in the crate when our counselor came. Because I am who I am, and I tend to over-share, I told our counselor that I was nervous about our dog who is overly excited when visitors come. She laughed and told me a story of a friend's dog who once jumped through a glass window because he got so excited about visitors. And then, honestly, it was no big deal. So if you feel better keeping the dog in a crate, that's what you do and just be honest about how the dog takes a while to warm up to visitors and you were nervous enough without also worrying about the dog. I honestly do not think it will affect your outcome at all. These counselors have done this so many times and I am sure that she or he has met a nervous dog once or twice before. Good luck and let me know how it all goes!