Recap of Adoption Orientation

It seems I’ve already broken my promise to post more frequently and I’m back to my old ways. Sigh. I guess I just have to try harder.

Anyway. Moving on. I have not yet given you the low-down on our progress through foster-adoption yet. We’re (obviously) very early on in our journey. As I stated before, we originally filled out a request online to be added to the list for orientation on October 17, 2011. We were told we would hear from someone within 2 weeks with an invitation to orientation. Two weeks passed and we heard nothing.

On November 1, 2011, I made a call to the local DFCS to find out what the holdup was. I was given the contact number to speak with the adoption coordinator who manages three counties – ours and two neighboring counties. I called to speak to her and was told she wasn’t in, but was instead in another county. I was, however, put through to her voicemail, so I left her a message. I half expected I wouldn’t get a call back, but about 4 hours after leaving the message, she returned my call. I explained why I was calling. She consulted her list of names of people who were waiting to be invited to foster/adoption orientation and we were not on the list! She asked when we had called and I explained that we had actually completed the request online. She explained this was the reason why our names were not on her list. Despite being given the option of completing information online, our names would not be added to the list unless we called the State hotline for information.

So, with a sigh of resignation, I completed that call and placed a call to the State hotline to add our names to the waiting list. After that, things moved a bit quicker! We received an email that evening with foster/adoption information and a week later (on November 8) we received our invite to foster/adoption orientation!
We attended orientation on November 15 and that very evening completed our initial information including our household information, Letter of Intent and consents for background checks. We are now waiting to hear back from our background checks. I expect no problems with this but, since we haven’t heard back from the caseworker yet, I called today to inquire on the status. I got no answer, but left a voicemail so will hopefully have an answer tomorrow.

We were told there would be no more IMPACT training classes in 2011 but once our background checks come back, we’ll be invited to the IMPACT training classes that will be held in the New Year. We are super excited! Hopefully, 2012 will be a fantastic year that holds lots of amazing things for us!