Unexpected Delays

My original plan was to write this blog sequentially until it was caught up to modern day, but we got a bit of an emotional gut-bunch related to our home study (our next step), that I want to touch on.

First, a quick time table to give some frame of reference:

•  July 2015 - Informational meeting
• August 2015 - Mandatory DHS training
• September 2015 - Application and intake interview
• October-November 2015 - Paperwork! Oh god the paperwork
• December 2015 - We lose our initial clinician and wait to get reassigned. We're given the expectation of a home study by late-Febraury
• January 2016 - Individual intake interviews. We get told we'll have some "homework" to improve our home study that may delay the timing of the home study.

And that's where we're at as of a few days ago. 

Three weeks went by after our interviews and we hadn't heard from the clinician. B&G Aid has been understandably understaffed after our original clinician left.

When she does get back to us with our "homework," it's a list of 10 action items to beef up our appearance to case workers. Some of them are things like "Attend this webinar in April" or "Go to this training class on May 21." 

I asked for an expected timeline based on this list and here's what I got back:

So I don’t have a clear timeline on when your home study will be completed right now. I don’t plan on coming out in late February at this time...  I think you need to take a few months to complete as many of these items so they can be incorporated into your study... The reality is the age range you are looking appeals to many families, and if I were to write your study right now, I don’t think you would be selected based on my experience of what caseworkers are looking for. My goal is to increase your exposure to children, expand your knowledge of adoption and attachment issues, and increase your support system to include families who have adoption experience. 

I felt a little crushed. More than a little really. I didn't realize we were talking about months of delay of our home study. Months of delay of the last piece we need before we're "in" and can start looking for a child. 

This was honestly very disheartening to hear. Logically it makes sense I suppose, but I'm struggling with realizing we're in some way factually unfit to parent. I know what we are looking for is limited, but I hadn't really faced the fact that basically we weren't good enough.

Yeah... we weren't really eased into this in either of our intake interviews. Just told we'd get some homework to make us look better and that the specifics we were looking for would make our options pretty limited.

So now it's on to pursuing a list of things we need to do so we look better on paper. Never mind that even our clinician joked that we don't have any unresolved "drama" like a lot of families, we both have healthy and strong relationships with friends and family, one of us is a teacher, and we have a solid and reliable income with good benefits.

I've never had a bad resume before. I guess it's time to do our homework. Anyone got a toddler we can borrow?

Exploring Our Options

I don't recall exactly when or how David and I decided it was time to give adoption a shot. It's been his goal in life to be a dad since forever. For me, it's something I grew into over time.

Usually with us something is an idea for a while, then the idea comes up more and more, and then we pause for a moment and go "we could actually do this..." There's a distinct lack of explicit planning towards our big goals, we just go with when we "feel" ready and then make sure the logistics work.

That's where we were at in the summer of 2015. I'm a man of practical information to help make decisions, so we started gathering information from various agencies. We were looking around websites at pricing, feasibility, resources, etc.

All of this resulted in David attending an information seminar with Boys & Girls Aid in July 2015. I was at a conference unfortunately.

We decided to pursue foster care adoption, and table any form of infant adoption in our first dive into starting a family. Boys & Girls Aid can and does facilitate both, which is part of the reason we selected them as an agency.

So since July 2015 we've been on the track for adopting out of the foster care system. It's now February 2016 and it feels like we're starting to get close. Our home study is hopefully around the corner, but we have a lot of narrative catching up to do first.

Introducing David and Derek

WTFoote is my common internet handle. Foote is my family name and I'll let you figure out the rest.

David and I met my freshman year of college. The freedom of traveling off to a university allowed me to dive into exploring my sexuality and actually pursuing relationships so I had all the internet profiles. Even Hot or Not, I was that classy.

We met online and chatted daily. We hung out once (apparently it was a date, I didn't even know). Some deliciously greasy food and extensive walking made me unfortunately sick. I like to joke the first time we met David made me violently ill.

Over the course of the year we chatted daily while going through separate relationships and experiences. It didn't occur to me for quite some time that chatting with a guy online being the highlight of my day was probably a sign of something.

Sophomore year I discovered he didn't have spring break plans. My plans constituted camping for a week and going nowhere with some friends. It felt natural to invite David along to join us. We'd seen each other maybe 2-3 times total at this point. It never occurred to me I was potentially inviting a creepy stalking ax-murder into the woods. Either love works in mysterious ways or in college I was a young man of poor judgment. Take your pick.

Kismet, is that the word? That camping trip was the kickoff of our relationship. We've spent years growing together and traveling through life - finishing college, starting careers, discovering ourselves, and now starting a family.

We're both big fans of science fiction and fantasy. I'm a CPA (more on that later) and David is a high school science teacher (maybe more on that later too?). We share our values of friends and family and some of our best adventures together simply involve a night on the couch with some booze and giggles.

Step 1: Setup the damn blog

This isn't my first rodeo but I still ended up falling into the same trap that probably catches every unsuspecting blog starter - layouts!

It was surprisingly challenging to make blogger's default template less ugly. It doesn't help that my bouts of creativity are few and far between and I took on this project while hunching over and/or kneeling at my desk. I gave my office chair up to our terrier-mix about an hour ago.

So why are we here? It's because I want to be a dad. Here's the thing... I'm not not religious, I'm sort-of gay (more on that later), and we're adopting through the foster care system.

Not gonna lie, I'm pretty much ripping off of James Banks blog/book Becoming Dad. I found it a day or so ago, love it, and it seems like he was on to something.

Thank you for the idea James. Now it's time for the adventure.