Wanted on voyage?

As the adoption process trundles on, it's difficult not to find it's become the whole focus of your life. Before we started there was just us, two adults doing what we do: going to the pub at the drop of a hat; going on holidays with lots of travelling between destinations and doing things like spending three hours in art galleries; going to fitness weekends and going out to restaurants whenever we felt like it. Now, though, the changes that the adoption will bring start to become more tangible. The thing is, we are aware of it and still can't wait. I have daydreams of taking Paddington on holiday to places with great beaches or to theme parks or to where they have places like great zoos and other attractions that are child orientated. I would be thrilled to give them the chance to try all sorts of foods, and trying to instill in them the genuine wonder at the world in nature and the people and cultures of the world that I feel.


Now, I know there are a lot of similarities to getting a child the usual way, and that every prospective parent has the same hopes and fears, but there is a major difference. Paddington is already out there, biding for his or her time until their new "forever mummy and daddy" brings them home. They already have their own personality and their own likes and dislikes. We might not be able to get them used to things like foods that we enjoy or (God forbid) they wouldn't like travelling by plane, say, for long trips. Our own biological child would have the same genes as we do and you wonder if that means they would have had the same tastes. On the other hand, where does nature stop and nurture take over? How much will we imprint our own lifestyles or (for want of a better word) culture on the new little member of our family? How much will we even want to? As I said, Paddington has his or her own developing personality which makes them unique and not a little clone of either of us and it's always going to be difficult to tread the fine line between giving them the opportunities and all the support and encouragement they need to be who they can be and over-egging the pudding or, more aptly, overbearing the Paddington, by being pushy and expecting too much. It looks like we've got a lot of playing things by ear and plenty of trial and error over the next few years

"While a generation digests high-fibre ignorance...."

Apologies for the delay since the last post. We've had so much stuff to complete for the social worker once the regular meetings began. Our first meeting lasted about 90 minutes and covered our support network. We then agreed to have meetings every fortnight, at least for the beginning. On this first time we were given homework to do to cover all of our addresses, education, work history and significant life events as well as a family tree. It is quite fun when you really get into it, I suppose, working over your past life and digging up memories that you'd not realised you'd remembered. If nothing else it reawakened my liking for old Marillion which I now can't get out of my head several weeks later. This is awkward because the intellectual snob in me thinks the lyrics are pretentious nonsense where Fish uses too many words he probably doesn't actually know the meaning of. Still, here's a version of Fugazi from Youtube, for no other reason than the fact that this blog doesn't have any pictures or stuff to make it look nice



Thing is we now feel like we are making pogress so Paddington starts to look like a more realisitic thing though at this stage he or she was still a vague, almost abstract idea.

Wheels in motion

It all started by looking up the local authority adoption procedure on the internet. You get yourself booked into an introductory meeting/presentation. They tell you what you might expect. Fair enough, it's all about the worse-case scenario. After all, children don't get taken away from their parents because they forced them watch X-Factor (though, in my opinion that would be reason enough). They usually get taken away because they are being neglected, abused or are deemed to be in danger in in some way, so they are likely to have problems and are not going to be the easiest kids to deal with.

Next up they send a social worker round for a home visit and go through a basic form to look at the basic requirements for adopting a child, like having space for them, making sure you have a sound financial footing, support network and that sort of stuff. It's all frothy and light at this stage, a bit like a social worker decaffeinated cappucchino. The social worker who visited us was a nice woman, enthusiastic and helpful, if a bit scatty in an endearing way. I think this is going to be the way things go. The people we deal with are, I'm sure, going to be lovely, but the mechanism that they work within causes the hold-ups and the general stress. I'm sure this will become more evident in subsequent blog entries. Saying that, there are horror stories on various fora online of people being rejected for what seem to be arbitrary reasons, so we must remain fairly detached from our social workers as they aren't actually our friends, however much they seem to be. Anyway, this initial visit seemed to go well for us and we got onto the next stage that very day when the social worker called the office to see if there were any places on the next initial training session and discovered that indeed there was. We received written confirmation a couple of weeks later so the ball was properly rolling.

The introductory training session is a two day affair when you met the other prospective adoptive parents on the current intake and go through some activities. There's the obligatory ice-breaker then there are the "let's get together and talk about the effects of X" group ativities. The main value of this session for us, though, was the opportunity to meet others in the same position as we are and to meet some of the social workers we will be dealing with. They also had a foster carer and a couple who had adopted three (yes, THREE!) siblings to give their slant on the adoption process. Otherwise, it is stating the obvious and, much like throwing a blunt javelin, is a largely pointless exercise.

The end of this came with our first setback. On getting written confirmation of our place on the initial training session, we were told that we would be allocated a social worker to commence the home study, which is the next part of the process. However, since their manager was off on long term sickenss, they wouldn't allocate any of our group a worker. This could have been partially due to the fact that the group contained 9 groups wanting to adopt (7 couples and 2 single women), which is a lot more than they are used to dealing with. Still, you can't help thinking that if it was any other sphere, work wouldn't just grind to a halt because someone was ill.

A few weeks later, after sending an e-mail since we hadn't heard anything (replied to by a stand-in manager) we were told that there would be some progress shortly. We had been concerned that we might have been put on hold, so this put our minds at ease for the time being. We heard nothing until a couple of weeks later when we got a call out of the blue from a kind of freelance, locum social worker. So we now have a date to commence our home-study in the New Year which means we might well be celebrating our last Christmas as a childless couple for some time. This year getting shit-faced, eating beef and out to the pub and parties till god knows when. Next year Santa, toys, turkey and still probably getting a bit drunk. It will be very, very different, but I really can't wait. Hurry home Paddington!

Wanted on voyage. An introduction

Hello all. This is the first entry of my blog to chronicle the ongoing saga of the attempt my wife and I are making to adopt a child. Let me explain something first. I initially wanted to write this blog to our incoming child, but decided it was way too twee, like that awful sodding Google advert with the guy typing stuff to his new-born daughter. So, I'm writing it in this way

I chose the name, 21st Century Paddington because we are hoping to adopt a child somewhere in the age range 3-5 years old and have no preference as to either a boy or a girl. As we hope the process will be taking sometime within a year (and this may be an optimistic time scale due to the obstacles put in the way by the various organisation we need to deal with), this means that they are somewhere out there right now. They have a name and a personality and they don't know we exist. So to refer to the child I need a name, rather than calling it "it". When I was young I loved the Paddington stories, by Michael Bond, mainly due to a boxset of his books that one of my aunties bought for me which I treasured and read over and over. For those of you who don't know who Paddington is, first of all let me be the first to welcome you out from the cave in which you were born and raised. Paddington was a bear from Darkest Peru who came to Britain by boat with a battered suitcase, a shapeless hat and a tag saying "Please look after this bear, thank you". He arrived in London and was found in Paddinton Station by the Brown family who took him home and made him part of their family. Adopted him, if you like. Therefore I thought Paddington would be a good name to refer to our child to come in the interim. Having grown up with these delightful tales, it's nice that the stories have some real relevance to my life now I'm a lot older

Why do we want to adopt?. Without going into too much detail, we tried to conceive a child the normal way but it just didn't happen. After a while we underwent medical investigations that were inconclusive, though we stopped short of the IVF (too much emotional, not to mention financial, investment in something that has, at best, a 20% success rate). We discussed the idea of adopting an orphan from somewhere like China, but were put off this by the bureaucratic assault course that adopting a child from overseas actually is. To give you an idea, imagine trying to pop to Tesco's but having to get over two Himalayan-sized mountain ranges to get over, separated by a bottomless chasm a few thousand miles across, and paying a five figure sum for the privilege. This was a few years back during which time we've moved to another part of the country and had put the whole adoption thing on hold for a while. Now the time seemed right to think more seriously about adoption but for a child from our own country. After all, it's not like there is a shortage of kids who need a home here. Since we are now a bit older than when we first thought about adoption, it just seems right to take in a child who is a little bit older which is where Paddington is going to come in. Not only that, but we don't have to deal with stuff like teaching them to walk, nappies and, quite literally, all that crap.

I think that pretty much sums up how we are where we are at the moment. I'll try and keep up to date on any progress we make in terms of the adoption process.