Family and Friends,
I hope you all are doing great! We had a
wonderful thanksgiving in Connecticut seeing Belinda, Chris, Charleigh
and Shirley. It was such a blessing to be with family!
I wanted to give everyone a little update on where we are at in the
adoption process. We finished our "classes" last Monday. We basically
have taken 8 weeks of classes learning information about the adoption
process, trauma and how to work best with kids from "hard places". We
have an intake interview with the social worker that taught our classes
this Tuesday, and there she will give us all our paperwork. That will
take a bit to finish, as we have to do background checks, fingerprints,
medial examinations and other stuff. After we finish the paperwork, we
start our homestudy. This is a 3 part interview process, one together as
a family, one separate and another together. During this process we
work with our social worker to identify what type of kids we can best
parent. After the homestudy is complete, we can start to contact state
social workers, who have "custody" of the "kids in waiting". We put our
profile in for any kids we want to be considered for, and they do
interviews to determine who is the best fit for each child. We don't
know how long this will take, what age our kid (s) will be, what issues
they will specifically have, and how many we will take into our home.
What we do know is that we will foster them for 6
months, and then the final placement paperwork will make them officially
our kids.
We also know that our children
will come from a background of trauma (physical, emotional, acute,
and/or ongoing) and most likely neglect. These are usually kiddo's who
parents have lost the right to parent them. The biological parental
rights have been cut off. So, needless to say, these kids need a lot of
love and have a lot of learning to do. At some stage in their
development (often in the very beginning) all the teaching and loving
that normal parents do, was stopped. They did not learn the attachment,
social skills and society norms that us and our kids have grown up
knowing. They really didn't have a loving parent teaching them that they
are worth loving and precious, they way most parents do!
Let's be honest, all of us have some great kids!
They all have their little issues (like we all do) but our kids are
really well behaved and love other people. So, these new kiddos are
going to be quite different from what we are used to as aunt's, uncles,
and grandparents... at least for a while. Chris and I will have a lot
of work on our plates to form an attachment with them, to love them
unconditionally, to parent them through the tough times as they are
still stuck in their survival mode from their past. They are going to
act out of survival for a while, until we teach them new ways to coping
with their feelings and anger. They will exhibit the behaviors at times
that seem inopportune or inappropriate. They will most likely exhibit
behaviors that are typical with a child about 1/2 their chronological
age. Imagine a 10 year old having a tantrum like a 4 or 5 year old
might! It could/will be quite the scene. But, we are in this for the
long haul! We are in a marathon of parenting, not a sprint! We are
more than excited and know that God has called us to this challenge to
give these kids a glimpse of redemption and love.
I tell you all of this to give you a chance to
prepare emotionally, as you will be a big part in these kids lives! I
know most of you probably won't see them a lot, since we live far away,
but that doesn't mean you can't know what is going on and pray for them.
Ok, that's all for now! If you have any questions,
please feel free to shoot me an email or call. Chris no longer has his
cell phone (just his work phone), so feel free to call my phone to get a hold of him too. Please pray for us and our future family as we seek to grow. We
look forward to sharing more with you as we continue in this process.
