Open Adoption - First Steps

Earlier in this blog, I made up some nice fake names for everyone.  I'm going back on that and using real names now.  The only time I'll make up a name is to protect someone who may not want their name shared.  So, my husband is Rob, and I am Shannon.

We moved fairly quickly once we changed our plan to adoption.  We had both read "The Kid" by Dan Savage and it really helped us to imagine participating in the process of open adoption.  The agency used by Dan Savage and his family was an agency local to us - Open Adoption and Family Services - and several people we knew were already in the process of pursuing adoptions with that agency.  I believe in their mission of all-options counseling and facilitation of open adoptions, so I felt good about moving forward with them.

The first step was to attend a two day seminar put on by the agency.  The seminar was mainly to educate us about open adoption and what is involved in entering into an open adoption with a birth parent, along with the steps involved in becoming adoptive parents.

After the seminar, a mountain of paperwork awaited us.  We filled out all kinds of forms, got fingerprints taken, background checks run, and wrote autobiographies.  We were assigned to a social worker, Maria, and she came to our home to do a home study over two visits.  Then we started working on our photo collage pages to present to potential birth parents and went through several interviews with Maria.  Finally, on May 1, 2012, we entered the pool.