The prep course...

We arrive early and report to the bustling front desk of the County Council building. The receptionist exclaims particularly loudly "Are you here for the Adoption Prep Course?" Every eye in the foyer turns to look at us with a look I am so familiar with by now. A kind of curiousness with a sprinkling of pity.

The room is all set up with large tables piled high with paperwork and much to my delight,  a plate of biscuits in the centre. Slowly more people start to arrive and we realise how lucky we are. Being locals and living so close, we know the area and sneaky car parking pretty well and are by far the most relaxed of all the people there. We spend the next 4 days of the prep course getting to know these prospective adopters really well as most of our time is spent doing case studies in groups and then presenting our findings and discussions to the class. It dawns on me how lucky I am to have absolutely no fear of standing up in a room full of people and speaking. So many of the group really had to face their worst fears by doing this and I commend them for that. Bit like asking me to stop eating cake really....

The content of the course is intense and covers a child's brain development, medical issues, trauma and attachment disorders, child therapy,  the adoption process incl. legal matters and we have numerous guest speakers all who have invaluable information and experiences to share.

We are such a complex mix of prospective adopters and on the last day I glance round the room and wonder how many of these people will we continue to stay in contact with. There's a lesbian couple, a couple of single adopters, and a number of older couples who already have children. There is one couple who we immediately 'click' with and for blogging purposes they will now be referred to as the Fraig's.They have the same silly sense of humour as us ( I will admit, there's something hugeley comforting when people laugh with you rather than at you!) They too have dogs and I can see us being a huge support for one another.
There is another couple who specifically want to adopt a disabled child. I have the most immense amount of respect for them. Let's call her Mrs. Rainbow. She makes me laugh when she says it's 'no biggy as they already have 2 children and the youngest (a teenager) is disabled and they are already familiar with that circle of life and she just wants to give another child a better life.' Phew! This makes me realise that we really need to think about what sort of child we would like to adopt. In all honesty, I am not sure we are ready for a disabled child. Does that make me a bad person? Mrs Rainbow assures me it doesn't.

We leave on the last day with our mountain of paperwork and feeling a little giddy with excitement. They quickly bring us back to reality when they announce it takes 8 weeks for them to allocate us a social worker for our home study. 8 whole weeks...I will admit, I am dissapointed. I am so ready for this but I guess we are just going to have to wait. I while away the weekends baking and we go away for a few camping weekends. While we sit around the campfire telling ghost stories and gazing up at the big night sky, I simply cannot wait to take our little ones(s) camping with us. Baking wise, I have a few cakes to make for friends, my favourite being a vintage rose cake for a 70th. I spend hours making this....I mean its not like I don't have the time on my hands.

Campfire mallows

Vintage Rose Cake

The initial visit...

I am up super early. I hoover every nook and cranny of the house, in fact I will admit, I even hoover the dogs! LRUN is nervous I can tell but he's trying to act cool. I re-boil the kettle several times and re-arrange the cookies......obsessively artistically.

She arrives and we instantly warm to her. I offer my squeaky clean kitchen table but she says she would prefer the lounge. I am sure she sees the panic in my eyes as I hadn't quite cleaned that part of the house as well. Oh well...She has a cuppa but declines my biscuits. I will admit, I am dissapointed in her. I eat the biscuits.They're good.

We talk and talk. She's here for about 3 hours. We talk about us, our childhoods, why we want to adopt, our lifestyle, how our lives will change. She talks about the system, how it works, their rules..which include no smoking and no unprotected sex (hee hee..feel like I am young again!)

She mentions that the next prep course is coming up next month and they might have a space for us. This would be so so super amazing but we don't want to get our hopes us as she explains that the deadline is tight. She has a few concerns about our lives abroad when we lived on sailing yachts and how they were going to get around the neccesary paperwork but we will have to work around it. Also, I am from South Africa which adds further paperwork nightmares but nothing we cannot handle or Fedex over. She has a quick look around the house and seems happy with it. One would hope so....I love our house. It's the perfect family home. We wave goodbye and close the door and both let our enormous sighs (well my LRUN passess wind but let's not go there...something about it was a long time to hold it all in!) We stand and hug each other...tightly. I hold my nose.

The night before....

I lie awake thinking what we should do about the dogs. I know they will get so over excited initially and what if she doesn't like dogs. I decide that a long walk in the morning will calm my nerves and tire them out and a chew bone should hopefully take care of the rest.

I spend ages cleaning the kitchen table and making sure everything is just right. I can't decide what to bake for her. It's stressing me out, so I decide to buy in some cookies. It feels safer this way and I opt for some oaty soft cookies.

She called!

We have a date for a home visit! I cannot begin to describe how excited we are. Ok, so it's still 3 weeks away but it's a date and it is something to work towards. I come home and make a batch of chocolate brownies and imagine myself making them with my little ones one day...chocolate and flour everywhere but I wouldn't mind. I smile quietly to myself.

Chocolate Brownies

 

Finally get a reply....

So three weeks later, I get a reply. It doesn't say much.....just an acknowledgement... but this is enough for me. It gives me butterflies. It says that a social worker will call me shortly to arrange a visit. I call my LRUN, we are beaming. It finally feels like we are getting somewhere.

Back at home, my Amazon wish list is spiralling out of control. I must be a  real dream target for any marketing analyst. There are books on adoption for dummies, toddler adoption, trauma, bonding, attachment issues and theraplay...all mixed in with a good helping of Peggy Porschen's romantic cakes, the Hummingbird Bakery and Cakes to Fall In Love With. I have a lot of reading to do.

The official application....

It's 9.05 on June 1^st and for me that means, the wait is up. It's someone's birthday at work, which can only mean one thing...cake! I make a cuppa tea, sneak in a millionaire's shortbread and begin my email to the Adoption Services with our official 'expression of interest.'

I click send and wait....

 

The infamous information evening....

We find ourselves 10 minutes early for the information evening and we try and sit quietly waiting for the meeting to start. We are both in real silly moods and looking back now, I can see we were both just nervous and that was just "our little way of dealing with it" I cast my eye around the room. A real strange mix of couples and I find myself wondering what each of their special stories or journeys have been like. But it seems inappropriate to just start randomly talking to anyone about their circumstances for being here, so we sit quietly, stifling our giggles.

The evening is short and informative, sadly with no cake. They talk about the psychological development of a baby's brain and the effects that trauma and attachment disorders have on them. Then we have a couple of adoptive parents in to give us the real life low-down on the adoption experience. A new young mum really catches my attention, she jokes about the two little terrors she has adopted . She says how she found the uncertainty of fertility treatments hard to cope with but with adoption, at least you know there will be a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. And that she still doesn't know whether that little pot of gold really doesn't like tuna or is just playing up. We leave feeling giddy...this feels so right but we know we have a long wait ahead of us. Due to previous miscarriages and fertility treatments, they want us to wait until June 2012 before we officially put in our application. I spend my time drooling over the pages of the Hummingbird Bakery book and test a new Coffee and Walnut Cake. Totally totally indulgent and lush and it feels good to put fertility treatments behind me and embrace the humble caffeine again.

 Coffee and Walnut Cake...
 

A short history of a very long story….
I was having far too much fun in my twenties to think about having a family. I loved being around kids but there was a whole world to explore and babies were the last thing on my mind.
I met my landrover uber-nerd (from now on referred to as LRUN) on a sailing yacht and after 7 years of lots of fun and worldly travels, I married at 36 and only then did we begin to think about starting a family. I fell pregnant pretty soon after we began to try and I will admit, we were both a little shocked but excited too. Sadly, I miscarried quite traumatically at 10 weeks and it took me a while to pick myself up and begin trying again. The trying then went on for a long time, each month the disappointment getting a little more hard to face. After 4 years, 3 rounds of IVF and another 3 miscarriages, we really had to stop and face up to the real issues here. How badly did we want a family? There was no doubting our desire to love and nuture a child and to be a family but did we really want to continue pushing nature to it’s limits? Perhaps we had been put on earth for a different reason?
We had thought about adoption a lot and it suddenly dawned on me one day that having a child was not all about the nine months of pregnancy or pushing a baby out of your noo-noo, it was more about the rest of your life being able to love, have fun with and care for a child. If everyone on earth was able to fall pregnant naturally, who would look after all the children who needed families? A friend said to me one day, “ I don’t understand how you could love and bond with a child that wasn’t your own." I realised then that that thought had never ever even crossed my mind and I knew right then that adoption was the right road for us. Besides, I can now look forward to being able to bounce on the trampoline with my kids for years to come, without the need for a Tena Lady!