Adoption class - 3 down, 7 to go!

Well, we've officially made it through 3 classes of training - 9 hours down, 21 to go.  Our classes have been... overwhelming.  There is so much to learn about our future kids, and so much to process about ourselves.  It's been incredibly helpful, but a lot to think about.

Last week, we learned a lot about grief and loss cycles.  We learned a lot about how to recognize and diagnose behaviors, and how to help kids cope with their grief, resource them, and teach them to recover from their loss in healthy ways.   We also talked through recognizing our own losses, and where we are in dealing with those loss cycles, to determine whether we would be an asset to a child with a similar loss or not.

I knew that these classes would help us learn a lot about these kids, but they're also helping us learn about ourselves, and our relationship.  It's been difficult in some ways, because it's material that weighs on my heart so strongly, but it's been good.

We've also filled out many, many forms.  Last week, we turned in the following:

• 18-page profile for me
• 18-page profile for Dave
• 15 page profile for couples without children
• 8 page profile on our family
• A photo of us
• A photo of our house
• A letter to our future kid(s)
• A letter to the biological parent(s)
• Copies of our birth certificates
• Copies of our drivers licenses
• Copies of our home, auto, and liability insurance
• Copies of Yarbo's vaccination records
• Copies of last year's tax returns
• A scrapbook about us and our home

I think that's about it.  We realized later that we forgot to include the floor plan of our house.  Hopefully that won't cause too much of an issue.   We also had over an hour's worth of reading as well.  Seriously, this stuff is intense!

We also have the first in-home appointment with our social worker this week.  Dave just finished a major attic insulation project this weekend, and between that and the holidays, our house is not at it's finest.  So, there will be major cleaning going on this week in order to put the house back in order!  I'm kind of wishing I had a picker-upper machine like in Cat in the Hat, but it will all work out ok.

 Hopefully we won't be docked too many points if a few things are out of order!  We've heard that having kids makes your house more prone to messes anyway, so we're just prepping ourselves.

Anyway, we have our class again tomorrow night, and I'm looking forward to it.  Every class we complete gets us that much closer, and that much more equipped to take care of our future kids.  Exciting!