Sickness and adoption meeting

I started feeling sick on Tuesday, I was on antibiotics the week before so I was extremely frustrated. By Wen morning I had a 101.6 fever. GREAT With a new job I had no sick time and there was no way I was going to call in and not get paid because hubby was soon to not be working. I sucked it up and went to work but as soon as I called the doctor they made me come in right way. Turns out I have a really bad case of bronchitis. SHOCKING! I get it every time I get sick, it's why I called the week before when I started feeling bad. Of course since I already did one round of antibiotics I knew it was going to be hard to get ride of. Thursday I was feel so bad I didn't go to work but I didn't want to miss our adoption meeting so I sucked it up and went.

When I got there hubby still wasn't there and that made me nervous as I was late myself and he only gets an hour for lunch. She had told me if there was a line not to wait in it to just call her, I did and it was busy, busy, busy. I had the wrong number. I was so annoyed, I emailed her and she came down right as Chris got there. She took us to an interview type room and gave us a stack of papers called the book for children. I thought it would have at least been a binder, I don't know why I expected more of dhs. She told us there was only one sibling group in our age range that she was planning to put our home study in for but to be warned because of the age range we want every child is going to have about 100 home studys turned in so not great odds. In my mind I was thinking well naturally we have 1/1,000,000 chance so 1/100 isn't that bad. 

She asked us a lot of hard questions such as would we be willing to take a low risk adoption. Mean they are a child that is on the road to having their parental rights terminated but haven't been yet. She gave the example of the mom has other children in dhs custody but that family doesn't want any more kids so they know she's going to use to lose this kid too. It's scary but it gives us a much much chance of getting an infant as most of these children are under the age of one if not six months. I thought this sounded like a good thing even if it meant a little more risk. DH did not think this sounded good, he said he didn't think I could emotional handle having a child taken away. 

Then she asked if we would be willing to do emergency foster care. In the state of Oklahoma they can not put children under the age of 6 in a shelter so they need emergency homes for them until they can find them a foster home. Normally two days to two weeks. She said a lot of families like this because it kinda prepares them to be parents without going full time right away. DH thought this sounded like a great idea which confused me after what he had said about doing low risk placement. This is when DH had to leave to go back to work leaving me on my own. 

I told her that I wasn't sure about the emergency placement because what do you do about day care because I have to work. She then shocks me and goes if you both work and adopt a child under the age of 6 dhs pays for their day care. I was blown away, I had no idea. Everybody I have told has acted like I was crazy for not knowing this but I had no clue. I told her we'd have to think about everything and talk it all over. 

She told us how everything works. It's a long process. One it takes children about 9 months to get put on the list for adoption so we pretty much can't get a baby baby. Once a month the whole adoption team meets and if their are any children in our range then we get submitted and it takes about two weeks for the childs case worker to view all the home studys. Once that is done the top three goes to state, and the top gets the choices to view the children's profile and history and they can either meet the child or pass to number two. If they meet the child then they have a sit down with them, us, foster parents, case workers and you can do several of those or go straight to over night visits and then placement. 

All in all the meeting went well and hubby and I needed to do a lot of talking. 

More to come on how that went.