Adoption Seminar, Day 1

10 wks, 5 days

Well, today was the first day of the adoption seminar (PRIDE training).

It was actually kind of fun.  The woman who is running our seminar is really good.  And it INCLUDES FOOD (it should for that price, right?)!  (JB, you might want to let them know about GF early - it seems that isn't hard for them to accommodate)

It was super interesting - I really like how they seem to be about honesty, and not about requiring perfect families.  It's also nice to get to know other people wanting to adopt - and actually, there were several people there that already had one or two kids, but wanted to grow their families through adoption.  And there were some people there who weren't sure, and so were taking the training as a way to better educate themselves, which is totally fair.

There was a lot of info about fostering, which is good, that's on our possibility list.  We talked to her a bit during the breaks about it - she says if we're fostering, it is more likely CAS would do our homestudy (aka, free).  We also mentioned we're expecting (privately), and what sort of ages would be good for our child and the foster child, and she suggested another baby would probably be ok, but CAS would decide if they felt we could handle it (totally paraphrasing here).

The training was CAS focused (again, that is children's aid society - aka, the kids that get removed from their birth families due to 'issues'), but she also added private (aka, infants - VERY few in Ontario every year) and international info into the presentation. 

The laws in the last few years have been reformed to make it easier to adopt local children, and they are seeing increasing adoption, which I think is great - instead of letting a kid get so old in the system they become 'un-adoptable'.

We also talked a bit about attachment issues when kids are moved from foster home to foster home.  Then she showed us the world's saddest video.  I don't know - I actually couldn't watch it, it was too sad.  It was from the child's point of view, and it was about how they kept getting moved from family to family.  SO SAD.  I was doing my best not to cry - you know when your jaw gets all tight because you're keeping it in?  Yikes.  I had to spend most of that time looking at the carpet.  I just kept thinking, "this is so sad.  Those poor kids.  It's not fair", and that would get me going.

We did a bit about how to get a child to attach to you, I really liked that.  It seems it would make sense even for birth children.

It also kicked of some good discussions DH and I had tonight, which was good - sometimes life gets in the way and we don't just sit down and spend hours talking about things.  We went through some what-if scenarios, really got us thinking about things.

DH's family is not really into the adoption idea - fostering might be a way to open them up to it.  And maybe foster-to-adopt if that works out would be great.

Or we'll see.