PRIDE Training Day #4 - We did it!!!

It's official (according to the certificate pictured above), we have completed PRIDE Training. Woo hoo!
Our last day was full of useful information and was probably the class we enjoyed the most. We spent most of the morning talking about our SAFE Homestudy Assessment (the next step in our adoption journey). We were able to ask a lot of questions about the process which eased our minds a little bit. Basically, the Homestudy is an assessment of the two of us and our immediate family by our Adoption Practitioner. Sounds intrusive doesn't it. On top of helping us to prepare our documentation to apply for our adoption, our practitioner will be making sure we are ready, willing, and capable of providing a home for an adopted child. Although our house is already equipped with child locks and safety features there will be a lot of other things that she will need to know about us before we can send in our adoption application. There will be reference checks, and physicals, and police checks (apparently my husband will also need one from Australia since he lived there for 7 months, that should be fun) etc. But I promise I will explain this process more once we are actually in the middle of it.
Our afternoon was filled with information on topics that will be important once our little boy is home with us. Topics like how to create a healing and nurturing home and how to use positive adoption language with everyone we come into contact with. I know that positive adoption language will be especially important for us since we will be adopting a child of a different race. We will need to be prepared for difficult questions from family, friends, children, and strangers about our child. It will be something our family will face our entire lives. Hopefully we will answer those questions in a way that all of our children will feel equally loved by their Mom and Dad. Because no matter how our family was made, all of our children will be our own.
Something that really interested me from our discussion on Saturday was creating Life Books for your adopted child. Life Books are a way for children to learn about themselves. They are essentially a photo book about their story on how they came into our lives. I love photo books and always have since I was a child, I think I will really enjoy making one for our boy and I am sure it will also strengthen my connection with him throughout our journey. It is a book that I hope he will refer to and be proud of his entire life.
I feel like I could write this post forever, the information we received in PRIDE Training was so beneficial and important and I'm finding it hard to fit it all into one little post. We are also very excited, we are now one step closer to adopting our child. It is crazy to think that after 4 years of talking about it we are now actually on our way!

PRIDE Training Day #3

Last weeks training heaviness felt like it lasted most of the week. Luckily we went to a great concert on Friday night with some good friends. The concert gave us a chance to relax and recharge in preparation for another training session on Saturday. Unfortunately, we stayed out far too late on Friday night. I mean it seemed like a good idea at the time, but our drive to Burlington the next morning ended up being a little more rushed than we had hoped.
The first half of our day we discussed cultural heritage. We shared stories about how we have learned about our own heritage and discussed the importance of learning about our adopted child's background as well. I really liked one of the concepts that was brought up by our leader Anne. She said that if you adopt a child from a different heritage or culture you then also adopt that culture. So once we adopt our boy from China our family will be Irish, Scottish, English, Canadian, and Chinese. Whoa that's a lot, but you get what I mean.
In the morning a guest speaker came in to talk about her experience when she adopted her two girls from China. At first we were very excited to hear her story but then quickly realized that her experience was much different than ours will be. She adopted almost 10 years ago when adoptions from China were a quicker process and when there were less restrictions on the parents applying to adopt. It was nice to hear a more relaxed approach to an international adoption. It gave us a bit of hope that maybe our adoption wont be very complicated, and that someday we can come and share our story to a training class to ease their minds about international adoption.
A majority of the afternoon was spent talking about openness in adoption. This is a subject in adoption that admittedly my husband and I are very scared of. We learned about the importance of keeping an open relationship (if possible) with the birth family of your child. Since we are adopting from another country and the likelihood of having information on our child's birth parents will be very slim, this topic didn't interest us much. We do know that someday our child may want to try and search for his birth parents. We will support him in any way we can to help him in his search if necessary. If he has a specific caregiver from China that he is attached to we will do anything we can to keep the communication open between them. At first by sending photos of him once he is home, and then possibly going back to visit where he lived once he is a little older. The openness that we will have will likely differ from most of the adoptions of our "classmates", as most of them will be hoping to adopt infants from Canada. In order to provide us with an example of an open adoption, a couple that finished their PRIDE Training course in 2013 came in to speak to us. They have just finalized their adoption of their now 10 month old, and they spoke of their relationship with the child's birth mother. They have ongoing contact with the birth mother and they have had two visits with her and the child already. They even talked about inviting her to the child's first birthday party. The concept of open adoption makes sense to me, and I can see the benefits for the child in the future by having open communication with the birth parents. But, I do know that it is not for me. At least not in the same way it is for our guest speakers. This is a difficult thing to admit because it is a selfish reason to adopt from another country but I am glad that I know and understand this about myself.
We have only one more Saturday left of PRIDE Training. I don't know how they are going to fit the remaining information into the final session because it seems like there is still a lot to cover. I guess we will see, stay tuned for an update after our last session.

PRIDE Training Day #2

The only word I can think of to describe our PRIDE training yesterday would be 'heavy'. It was a long day of some difficult topics that left both of us a little drained and in some ways discouraged. We know that adopting a child comes with many challenges but we came out of the class yesterday feeling like all of the knowledge we have gained over the past two years while raising our daughter will be useless. Of course we know that this is not true but it doesn't change how we were feeling at the end of the day.
The three main topics that were covered yesterday were human development, attachment, and loss. A guest speaker arrived in the morning to talk more about child development, specifically speech. She is a Speech Language Pathologist and she talked about the services that are available to any child with delays in development. We know that our little boy will have some degree of a cleft lip or palate and she touched on the process that we will likely need to go through in order for him to receive speech therapy.
After lunch we watched a video that made us both very emotional. It featured a young girl and her baby brother and their journey through the foster care system. I found it very difficult to watch a video portraying the horrible things that some children witness and experience in their lives when their parents aren't able to take care of them and when the foster care system fails them. I ended up leaving the room as I could not watch any more. Chris stayed to watch the end of the video so that once I returned he could tell me that the story ended well. It left both of us feeling scared, helpless, and very sad. No child should have to go through something like that and it made us realize that there are very real problems and complications that come with adoption no matter what process you go through. We have always been so focused on our international adoption that we sometimes fail to see the problems that are happening right here. It made us think about being foster parents in the future once our children are older (this is something we have talked about before) and it created some really good conversations between us on our drive home.
As I said in my last post, there is one other family in our training group who have a child already. They asked our leader that has one biological child and three internationally adopted children for recommendations on integrating siblings in the adoption process. This ended up being another topic that we talked about a lot on our drive home (good thing we have an hour and a half drive, gives us lots of time to talk). One thing she recommended is that one really good way to include your child is to bring them with you when you go and get your adopted child, especially if it is an international adoption. This is something that we have always struggled with as we weren't really sure what was the best thing to do. So as crazy as it may sound, we have decided that Maeve will travel with us to China so that she can meet her little brother at the same time we are meeting him. That way she will feel completely involved in the entire process and we can start to connect as a family immediately. So now comes the fun part of teaching a 2 year old that she has a younger brother that lives in another country. And that we will someday travel on a very long plane ride to pick him up so that he can be in our family forever. I think its time to hit the children's section of our local bookstore.....

PRIDE Training Day #1

Yesterday was our first day of PRIDE (Parent Resources for Information, Development and Education) training. PRIDE training is a mandatory training course for anyone who plans to adopt in Ontario.
We didn't really know what to expect when we arrived in Burlington at 9 am yesterday but we were both excited to get the process started. Our training session was lead by to co-leaders. One is an adoption professional and the other is an experienced adoptive parent. There were 9 other couples in the session with us. We introduced ourselves and our reasons for choosing adoption fairly early on in the morning. That is when we felt much more at ease. Although most of the people in the room have chose adoption because they cannot have children on their own, we still felt some comfort knowing that most of the people in the room are likely going through the same things we are and are probably feeling the same as well. It was hard to listen to people who have struggled with infertility share their stories. It made me feel bad at times because our reasons for adopting are so different. It's hard to explain what I mean but because our story of adoption has always been a happy one I found it hard to listen to couples that have tried for years to have children and have now turned to adoption because some of them have no other choice. It doesn't make any one's reason for adoption any better or worse it just makes our journeys a bit different. We didn't discuss what types of adoption the other couples were pursuing (whether private or international etc) because some of the people attending are still not sure what they want to do and the sessions are designed to help people make an informed decision. We do know that the couple that was sitting with us also have a daughter and are adopting internationally. Although our stories are a bit different it was nice to know that someone else in the room is just as focused on the international adoption information as we are.
The information we received yesterday was more of an overview of the different types of adoption and the processes and laws surrounding the process. Some of the information was relevant and some was not but overall we felt that the session was helpful and we weren't dreading coming back for the next 3 weekends. I am personally looking forward to the next session because we will be talking about attachment and loss issues in adoption. These are issues that come with any adoption whether international or not so it should be very interesting.
I will try to keep everyone posted as we proceed through our training. For those of you who are following us please let me know if you received an email when I updated the blog.

Follow Us

I have added something new to the Blog that I know will make some of you very happy. Below, on the right hand side of the page you will see "Follow by Email". If you type your email address in the box and then press submit...Presto.... you will be following our blog. That way you shouldn't have to worry about missing a post.
Thank you in advance for all of those who follow our journey.

Congratulations?!

Recently a few of our friends pointed out that the child we will be adopting has likely been born by now. To be honest, I hadn't thought about it in that way (at least not recently) as I have been so caught up in paperwork and upcoming training.

Somewhere in China a little boy has been born and has likely been given up for adoption already. It is so sad to think that we wont even get to meet him until he is over a year old. That is something that I am sure will make this process very hard to understand sometimes. I am also hoping that having this in mind will keep us motivated and strong throughout the endless paperwork and bills while we wait to be approved as parents for this little boy.
Being prospective adoptive parents is very different than going through the journey of getting pregnant and having your own baby for many obvious reasons. I think about this fact often. How if this was our birth child we would have received dozens of cards from family and friends congratulating us on baby #2. People would be asking  "how are you feeling" each day as my belly grew larger. (Not that I miss that, as most of you know I did not enjoy pregnancy, although it was completely worth the end result!) Having a child somewhere across the world feels so different. Some days it is exciting to think about, other days overwhelming, and some days it is just sad. I am not saying this so that more people ask how we are doing, or ask where we are in the process. People are doing that all the time and it is wonderful. It is just an observation that I have had. Something that weighs on my mind now and then.

Update: Last month Chris and I registered for PRIDE (Parent Resources for Information Development and Education)Training. PRIDE Training is essentially a prep course for adoptive parents. For more information please click on this link: http://secure.adoptontario.ca/mobile/pride.main.aspx#&ui-state=dialog
Our training takes place over 4 weekends in Burlington, Ontario in May and June. One full day each weekend (9 am - 5 pm).
Once our PRIDE Training is complete we will start to work with our Adoption Practitioner (approximately July). I promise I will provide an update before then.

Somewhere Between

Last night as I was flipping through the TV channels I noticed a documentary on TVO called 'Somewhere Between'. I think it was luck, or fate that I stumbled upon this movie just as it was starting. The film starts off by showing a family that has recently adopted from China. The mother in the film is talking about all of the questions that her adopted daughter will someday have and she reflects upon the fact that she may not know all of the answers. From there the mother turns into the filmmaker stating that she is making this film for her daughter so that someday she can watch this and have some answers to her questions.
The uniqueness of this film is that instead of following the parents who have adopted the child from China, it follows the lives of four teenage girls who were adopted from China. I found the film very moving and eye opening from a prospective adoptive parents point of view. Although the film takes place in the U.S I thought the issues the girls experienced were globally relatable.

I would recommend watching this film to anyone that has questions about our adoption. It may clarify a few things for you or it may bring up more questions or concerns.
Watch for it on TVO or search for it to tape on you PVRs. I think I might even download it on iTunes to show to our families. It is just too good not to share.

Here is a link to the website for movie if you are looking for more information. http://www.somewherebetweenmovie.com/directors-statement