Imagine you are 8 months old and you have already had 10 broken bones. Imagine that one of those breaks could only have occurred by someone twisting your tiny arm as if wringing out a towel. Now picture that you are two years old and thriving in a stable, loving household today. Your journey to a family is complete, although the healing and recovering will take years. I can't even begin to wrap my head around that and yet the daughter of one of the panel families experienced just that.
Adopting a child or children from the foster care system is going to be both a rewarding and very challenging experience. We feel much better informed about the path we have chosen and feel good about our decision for "special needs" adoption to be our Plan A. The main message we received is that it will be a very long process and we will likely get our hopes up a number of times before we are placed with our forever child or children.
One of the topics I discovered the most surprising was the idea of a trans-cultural adoption. I was not surprised by the option, simply by the conceptions around it. I guess it is because we have such a diverse community of friends at I view it as a very low priority on the list of things these children are facing. We are discovering that Portland, while progressive in many ways, is not very diverse. I find that quite surprising as it is a coastal town similar to Seattle and San Francisco which are both quite diverse. Whatever the case may be, we are very thankful for our wonderful and diverse community!
We met some great people over the course of the weekend, which is exciting. We know that we are going to be adding an another community to our world - one filled with potential and post placement adoption families. It is exciting to see that there are going to be people with similar interests, outside of the obvious.
Now on to more classes and the dreaded home study! We have heard rumors it is something like 150 open ended questions that we each have to answer separately followed by all kinds of checks and interviews.
Location:Hillsboro,United States
