Well now that we are sort of up and running with our blog private, I hope that this will be able to stay a place where we can share our adoption story safely with our friends and family. While we were at our adoption seminar 1 1/2 weeks ago we had this conversation with our agency director and she let us know that when we are in country we would not be able to post anything about our time there publicly because the officials in Ukraine check to find blogs on adoptive families and if they are offended by things written on any public forum they can make your process difficult or impossible. So in preparation for that we wanted to take the precaution and make this blog private. Thanks for being patient with this and being willing to take the extra steps to still follow our story!
So here is an update from our first meeting with our social worker and our international adoption seminar.
Friday March 1, 2013 we met with our social worker (we will call her "M") at her office in Winnipeg. She has many letters behind her name and is very qualified in social work, child play therapy and child attachment issues. She was very clinical and it was hard if not impossible to read her. We spent our whole 2 hour meeting answering questions and talking about our parents and how they raised us. We had to make lists about our parents character traits and our relationships with them through the years. We kind of felt under a microscope and I am sure that this is just the beginning. We will have 5-6 meetings with her and one of those will be with her coming to our house.
We left her office and because our seminar was in the morning at 9am we booked a cheap hotel through priceline and stayed the night in the city. We were going to go out and maybe walk around the forks or something but we were kind of worn out after all the thinking back to our childhoods that after supper we just went to our hotel to relax. We knew that the next day we would be "drinking from a fire hose" of information all day and we wanted to be ready to soak it all in.
In the morning after we searched for our truck in the parkade for over half an hour we made it to our agency's office on time. We had breakfast with the other 3 couples taking the seminar with us. We are all at the same place in our process so it was neat to talk with them. One of the other couples is also adopting from Ukraine but the other 2 are going with Russia because they would like a child under the age of 2.
The day consisted of many different speakers coming in to talk on different aspects of adoption. They were very knowledgeable and the information was helpful. Most of the information is not from a biblical world view so we have to put it through a filter but we can still glean a lot from the experiences of others.
Because our agency's focus is Ukraine they fed us Ukrainian food all day long. I should have taken pictures of the feasts they put out for us. Cabbage rolls, sour krout, meat balls, sausage, perogies, breads, cakes. It is different than we are used to but we liked most of it! We ended the day with a family that adopted a boy from Ukraine at the age of 9. He has been home now for almost 2 years. It was nice to meet him and talk with this parents about their experiences in Ukraine and adjusting to life back home. He is their only child and so it will be different for us but our experience internationally will be similar. We were very exhausted after the day was done!
Note on Social workers;
Our agency has 4 social workers that they use to do their clients home studies and 2 of them were at the seminar to talk about home studies and raising children. They were so relaxed and relational that we were feeling a bit cheated with the SW that we had assigned to us. So we talked to the directer of our agency after the seminar and asked how come there is such a difference and if there was a possibility we could switch SWs. She explained to us that she gave us M for a reason. She is very qualified and the government doesn't question her. Our child and family services in Manitoba has the opinion that no family should have more than 2 children. It is "just too much to handle." So if they are going to grant us permission to adopt then we need M to get us through CFS. She will present a very strong case and if they balk at her because we want 7 children she will fight for us. It is not against the law to have 7 children and it is our right as Canadians to adopt as long as we can prove that we would provide a good home and good parenting. She will fight against the discrimination of large families. So we are thanking the Lord for M and even though she probably doesn't share our family values God can use her to achieve his purposes. We pray that we will be able to show her how God makes all the difference when it comes to raising a family!
So we meet with her again this week Friday at 3:00 so if you think of us from 3-5 pray for us and for M as we navigate this together!
No comments:
Post a Comment