The Adoption Process: Hurry Up and Wait

The adoption process, whether domestic infant, international, or foster care, can best be defined as hurry up and wait.

It involves paperwork, deadlines, urgent emails, frantic cleaning, and important phone calls. It also involves a lot (a LOT) of waiting. Much of our process has gone this way. We check our email constantly, clear our schedules as much as possible, and spend late nights surrounded by paperwork to turn things in as quickly as we can.

And then, we wait. County and agency workers are busy, and have a number of parents and children on their case loads to communicate with and make decisions about. Things are being discussed and considered behind the scenes, and that takes time. Not to mention the chaos of trying to coordinate meetings of anywhere from two to a thousand people.

Now here comes the BUT…

BUT sometimes, things move quickly and there isn’t much time to wait. For whatever reason, county workers find themselves in a situation where they need to find an adoptive family quickly, and certain families get swept up in that process. Suddenly, it’s a lot more hurry up than it is wait.

Now here comes the SO…

SO two weeks ago, we learned the names of our future children. I’ll let that sink in for a minute (it’s still sinking in over here, too).

Let me preface this by saying, at our new year’s family meeting, we chose our word of the year: SLOW. We decided to give ourselves over fully to the wait, to take things as they came, to program our schedules less so we had more time to breathe. But life doesn’t like to wait, it likes to surprise you.

Okay so, there we are, all ready to go SLOW…and we get an email from our social worker on a Thursday with the public profiles of two little boys who needed an adoptive family quickly. Although we only had a few sentences about them, we both immediately texted each other and shared that we felt there was something special about these boys, like this might be it. Within minutes we replied and told our worker to submit our home study for consideration.

On Monday, we heard that the kids’ workers would like a phone call with us and our worker. On Tuesday, we said yes, we’d love to move forward into collateral meetings. On Wednesday, we heard they wanted to move forward with us too. On Thursday, we heard they’d like the boys to visit for respite care Friday through Sunday (which is highly unorthodox…as I’ve mentioned before, you typically don’t meet your children until you are fully official and have said yes to adoption).

That all means that just eight days after reading their names for the first time, we met our boys. They slept in our home, we played, we read books, we ate meals together, we had bath time. These cherished moments that we have been anxiously awaiting for over two years were happening, right this second. By Sunday evening when we dropped them back off to their foster family, we knew that there was nothing in the world you could do or say to convince us that these two little souls were not meant to find ours. We missed them before they had unbuckled their seatbelts.

Since then, we’ve had two more follow up calls and created a tentative transition plan. We will have a few more overnight visits, and then in a few short weeks, they will move in. For good. After so much wait, it’s time to hurry up. Time to make their room a little cozier, to have their favorite foods on hand, to prepare our hearts and home for a constant presence, to catch up on sleep! To have one last late night out just the two of us before we insulate ourselves at home for a while to bond as a family, before we become Mom and Dad, forever.

This is exciting, and terrifying, and surreal. This is fun and hard. This is the craziest and best thing we will ever do. So here we go–here’s to hurry up and wait, to this gentle and wild life, to our sons.

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Cheers: One Year of Gentle Wild

Here’s to 2018. *clink*

A year ago I put together a blog to announce our foster care adoption process. I thought that maybe this would be a place for our loved ones to keep up with our journey, if they wanted to, and sharing every little thing on social media didn’t feel right. So, I created a little spot over here and we shared our news with our Christmas card message. I thought maybe we’d post a few times over the course of the year, as things moved along and we had significant news to share.

A few months in, this blog evolved into so much more. It became a safe space to share how I was really feeling and to process those feelings in writing. It is still a scrapbook of sorts, capturing our experiences so far and our hopes and dreams along the way. But it’s also a very public journal, documenting the feelings, both good and bad, that come along with this foster care adoption journey.

In December, I stepped away a bit (not just from the blog, from other social media and in-person commitments) because we had some major ups and downs in our adoption process that felt too big to sum up in a blog post. We did a lot of reflecting, working through big feelings, and making hard decisions. In the midst of it all, we took a pause from the matching process to breathe and just “be” during the already busy holiday season. We hope to be back in the matching game (and I in the blogging game) after the new year.

As I reflect on how far we’ve come and what is coming next, perhaps most meaningfully, I realized that Gentle Wild grew into something bigger than I could have imagined: a vehicle with which we can teach others what we wish we would have known. Now when I write a post, I have the goal in mind of helping readers see “the man behind the curtain” and painting a fuller picture of what this journey is like for everyone involved. You learn as I learn.

As it turns out, that’s what you needed! I’m so grateful to those of you who reached out to share how my words encouraged you, made you think, taught you something, or comforted you. Although things have been a little quieter around here this month, I still think it’s worth celebrating how far this little blog has come.

Posts	21
Visitors	1,350
Views	2,106
Countries Represented	16

In all honesty, I’ve never been able to keep a blog alive for longer than a month or two (I tend to be a big picture thinker who gets a great idea and then gets bogged down in the details and gives up). But one year later, I can’t imagine giving up on my little corner of the internet. If nothing else, the numbers ignite my competitive side and fire me up to stay the course! The idea that 1,300 people found even one of my sentences worth reading blows my mind. Who knows where Gentle Wild will be in another year? 

 So, here’s to 2019, too. *clink*

Licensed to Parent

It’s official!

Our home study is signed, sealed, delivered and we are a licensed foster home!

Cue the question: so, what’s next? 

Now that we’re licensed, we are allowed to view what’s called the “private narrative” of children we are interested in learning more about. These narratives could come to us one of a few ways: we request them based on a public profile we saw of a child, our social worker sends them to us based on a private database she shares with other social workers, or a child’s worker sees our profile on that same database and reaches out to our social worker about us.

If we feel comfortable moving forward with a child after reading their private narrative, we can submit our home study to their social worker for consideration. From there, it’s a matter of fit, meaning if that child’s social worker reads our full home study and feels confident we would be a good fit for that child, we would move forward with interviews, meetings with that child’s support team, and more. This can be a lengthy process as a lot of schedule coordination and research is vital to collect as much information as possible about that child so we can make an educated decision about whether we can commit to parenting them forever.

You might be wondering why we had to get our foster care license when we are exclusively pursuing adoption and not fostering. When adopting children from foster care who are considered “waiting children” (those with biological parents whose rights have been terminated voluntarily or involuntarily), the state of Minnesota has a law that the child must be in our home for at least six months before the adoption can be finalized. During that six month period, they are technically still in the guardianship of the state, and we are technically their foster parents, although we have committed to permanency with that child. You can read more answers to commonly asked questions like this one here.

There are still many steps to go before we are matched with a child or children, but we are taking this opportunity to celebrate the major milestone of being officially licensed! Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far and for continued prayers as we move forward with open hearts, knowing the many challenging decisions that lay ahead.

-Laura & Nate

Foster Care Adoption: Little Steps, Big Excitement

Today, it has been 84 days since we turned in the giant manila envelope with our application inside.

Also today, we learned that after 84 days, the right email makes us do this:

We have been assigned a social worker by our agency, and we will be starting the home study process very, very soon! There will be so many things to do and learn in this process as we get ready for our future child to arrive.

We know this is a small step, but it’s a step nonetheless, and we are unashamed of our over-the-top joy about forward movement and having things to work on and look forward to. WE’RE SO EXCITED AND WE JUST CAN’T HIDE IT.

Laura & Nate