It has been forever since I posted because we have just been waiting for our practitioner to put together a rough draft of our homestudy. The last two and a half months have been very frustrated. She has given us a number of time frames and deadlines and not met any of them. This past week I finally got The Ministry of Child and Youth Services involved (they regulate practitioners, who are essentially self employed). The two people I dealt with at The Ministry were wonderful and stepped in to help get our homestudy complete. We have a meeting set for this Sunday afternoon with our practitioner to review our rough draft. If there are not too many changes she will make them on the spot and we will leave there with our completed homestudy in hand.
I am trying not to get too excited because I know it may very well be next week before it is done but I am excited to at least look at it on Sunday. This process has taken far longer than we expected. Our practitioner received the last piece of information she needed from our PRIDE trainer on May 30th and we expected to have everything finished up shortly after that. I feel a bit like we have wasted the last few months but work has kept us on the go so maybe it is a good thing.
Once our homestudy is complete our first order of business will be to hire a new practitioner. I could go into all the trouble we have had with the current woman but really what it comes down to is that we do not trust her. Both Nic and I feel we need someone who will support us, look out for our best interests and is trustworthy. This woman does not fit the bill. We have four potential practitioners that we are going to have consults with. We do not want to make the same mistake twice so are going to see a number of people and pick who we like best. They are located everywhere from Bath to Pickering so we will be doing some travelling but there is not much we can do about that. Hopefully we will find someone great and get this adoption process rolling.
Once we hire a new practitioner we can get our profile up online and start to meet with adoption agencies. We also have a name of a Toronto abortion clinic that we want to contact and we may put an ad in a newspaper way up North that has an adoption section. We are also going to meet with the Picton CAS and make sure they have our homestudy on file. So there will be lots to do once we hire a practitioner.
It will be so nice to start doing something productive again. All this waiting has taken its toll on me. Nic has been a wonderful support and our relationship is stronger than ever. We have managed to take some time away from work this summer and have done lots of camping, boating and visiting with friends. I feel like we have not been home all summer but it has been a wonderful change from our usual summer chained to the office or job site.
We both still feel confident that adoption is the right choice for us. You do re-think it when you feel like everywhere you turn you hit another road block. It may be a bit of a cliche but I do feel "whatever does not kill you makes you stronger". We have a strong foundation as a couple. These first 6 months of the adoption process have just added a few more layers of cement to that foundation. We are both excited and looking forward to beginning the next stage of the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment