The final day of prep group

I am just home from the final day of our prep group training, and I have to admit to feeling a little emotional about the course finishing. I mentioned to a couple of the other people on the course, that I had felt like I had been living in a bit of a cocoon for the last few days, and I was surprised to hear that others felt exactly the same. Firstly, it feels like we've been in training for much longer that a few days, it feels like we've been on the course for a couple of weeks. Secondly, it's been wonderful to be spending so much time with other people who are all in the same place as us and really understand what we're all going through. Thirdly, having had a couple of months of inactivity on the adoption front, the last week has been all action and it's felt very real and like we're really getting somewhere. Now, all armed with theoretical knowledge we're back home and back in the hands of the social workers to find out how long we have to wait before the next stage starts.

It has been so lovely getting to know the other couples on the group. When we went to day one, I said to G that I really hoped that there would be at least one other couple that we would consider friends by the end of the training, so that moving forward we would have some mutual support from the only other people that truly understand what we're going through. So I am fairly amazed that actually I feel like we've made friends with all five of the other couples of the course, and we've all exchanged emails and phone numbers and we're already planning our first get together.

Today's course was another really positive day. We started off looking at how you explain adoption to a child, and looking at the ongoing development of the tools and language that will appropriate with the different stages our child will grow through. We then had a great presentation from the Adoption Panel's Medical Advisor who explained a lot about how the medical assessment process would work, the sort of information that will be available to us about prospective children, and the sorts of short and long term medical issues that we will be faced with when looking at possible matches.

We then had another adopter in to talk about her experiences of matching, and looking at how she dealt with the developmental uncertainty of the 11 month old little boy that she adopted 3 years ago.

After lunch we looked at post adoption support services before finishing off with a big group Q&A and a look at the next steps.

Talking of which, the next steps....

We now have to complete a learning log each, reflecting on the topics covered over the last few days. We submit that to the social work practice manager for assessment, and then we will be told who are assigned social worker is. We then start our assessment visits, of which there will be about 10, these should start around September time. The aim is to get us to panel in about 6 months time, so hopefully February time.

And in the meantime, there's plenty of reading and research to continue with, and hopefully a few meet ups with the others in our group along the way!