Here is an update from the past 4 days. 

Friday was our first outing out of the foster home with just our daughter.  My wife and I took here over to Cosmic Adventures. Once she got into the ball pit to play, she just wanted to run to all the different structures in the under 3 area.  It was so fun to be there with her.

Saturday was another big day, on this day she met her new brothers and sister for the first time.  Her three older siblings were so excited to meet her in person for the first time.  They knew that they needed to allow her to become adjusted to them.  It was lunch time so we headed to Wendy’s.  Then we all went to the Aviation Museum, we knew that it was a huge wide open hanger that she could run and explore with the added bonus of the huge airplanes to give her something to look at.  They also have a fun kids area that they all could play together with some toy airplanes.  She absolutely had a blast with brothers and sister.

Sunday was the first day that she could come over to her new home.  She spent the afternoon with us, and played in the family room, explored the upstairs, and loved how she could make a maze through the upstairs and keep finding Mom.  She had supper with us, and laughed with the kids at the table.  Then we had to bring her to the foster home and my wife was able to put her down to sleep for the night.

Today she was over again for the afternoon, and had so much fun.  She kept going into her new room and looking at her bed and smiling and laughing as she walked around.  We had to bring her to the foster home again and put her to bed.  This is a very hard thing to do, to leave the foster home and drive back home without her. 

We have a few days left in the transition.  The adoption is to be finalized this Friday.

Here is an update on our adoption process. Here is my last post on it.

We got the call on Monday that we would go and meet our new daughter Tuesday for the first time in person at the foster parents home.  Then we would plan the transition phase on Friday.  We were happy that we could meet her for the first time, but we weren’t pleased that we would have to wait a few days before the transition would start on Friday.  That would be very hard.

We went to the house and our daughter came right over to my wife to have her pick her up. We then got to spend the next hour playing with toys with her. 

We got a surprise as we got to set the schedule for the transition while there, and it started today, and it is set until next Monday.  The next couple of days we go to the foster home, for her to get more comfortable with us. Friday, my wife and I get to take her out for a few hours to a playplace.  Saturday our other kids get to meet her for the first time, and Sunday she comes to our house all afternoon and we bring her back to the foster home to put her to bed. Monday we set the rest of the schedule after her doctor appointment.  Hopefully, middle to end of next week, she will be in our home permanently. So far things are going very good with the transition.

Our case worker is very good, and has been really getting things in place and the process moving at the right pace, as we had thought we wouldn’t get to start the transition until Friday. 

Today’s visit was very good, we brought a couple of pictures over to leave with her, so that she can look at them when we are not there and the foster parents will talk to her about us and point to the pictures. We started being called Mommy & Daddy to her today.  Again, when we got there, she had my wife pick her up.  We also got to give hugs and play games.

The foster mother also told us today that she thought our daughter was meant for us, that we are the right people to adopt her.  You could tell that she was saying that from her heart as well.

The hardest part is leaving the house, and having to wait until the next day. It plays on your emotions. But in a short time she will be here permanently.  We have also been getting lots of encouraging emails, Facebook posts and messages, Twitter DM’s and @replys, and phone calls.

It is such an incredible experience.

During the first week of vacation, these were some things that we did as a family.

The 2nd week of vacation for us, had us doing the following:

- Found out we were matched to a 19 month little girl to adopt into our family.
- Went to the Royal Canadian Mint, where we found out a lot of cool information about Canadian coins and the process to make them. Very interesting fact was that Canadian can refine the purest form of gold, 99.999. Also, Canadian has made the biggest currency coin; face value $1 million dollars and there are 5 made….collector value 3.5 million. Canada also make coins for other countries, 15-20 in total.
- Next stop was the Aviation Museum
- New Year’s Eve service at Calvary Church
- Went down to Upper Canada Village for the Alight at Night in Morrisburg, Ontario.
- Played some more of the Wii console.

This post is kind of a mini dump of some thoughts that I have been thinking about since receiving the phone call on Friday about the adoption match.  About my little girl…..

• I have been wondering everyday what you would be doing since I heard about you.
• When I was closing my eyes to sleep, I wondered if you were sleeping already
•  Did you wake up through the night?
• What did you dream last night?
• When I have a meal, are you eating at the same time?
• Did you play with your favorite toy?
• I found out today that you have an ear infection and pink eye….are you doing ok, I wish I could be with you to help.
• Do you feel better tonight?
• What do you look like, I get to see a picture for the first time tomorrow.
• I wore a blue shirt today, what color did you wear?
• Your brothers and sister played on the Wii today, they want to build you a Mii character
• I prayed for you and so did everyone else.
• Faith Apostolic and Calvary Church will be praying for you
• We have been getting phone calls, Tweets, Facebook posts, and emails from people when then found out about you.
• Did you play in the snow over the weekend?
• I listened to some of my favorite music while working….I can’t wait for you to come into my office when I am working and sit on my knee and listen to music together.

We are excited to meet you!

Tags: Adoption, thoughts, daughter

Today we received a phone call (well actually yesterday if you are reading this Saturday) from our Adoption Case Worker, that a match was made. They have a child in foster care that was matched to our family.

The little girl is 19 months and we will be able to meet her for the first time next week.

The next few weeks will be a whirlwind of activity, as once things progress after the initial meeting, the transition into our home will take approx 1-2 weeks. 

The kids are very excited to be getting a new little sister.  I do not think my daughter has stopped glowing. Everyone is excited to meet her.

We will be posting more on the blog as we go.

Tags: Adoption, CAS

In the past two weeks we have had two evening sessions and an all-day Saturday session for the PRIDE Adoption training that we need to complete. With each session there are four small breakout groups that we are tasked with a question and have to present our answers to the whole group. Each couple is split up into a different group. So far, I have been the presenter for our group each time but one. I guess I am at ease with presenting in a group.

This past Saturday we had a big potluck lunch, and I had some delicious chicken strips covered in Thai sauce, so good I am going to be asking the lady that made them which brand of sauce she uses. 
The training is made up of all different “resource” parents, such as Foster, Parent-Model, Adoption, Kinship, which is good because you get the full spectrum of the care system for the children.  You also get to understand the full process better.

We have covered the following topics:

• Teamwork towards permanency
• Needs & Attachment
• Loss
• Principles of Discipline

Each of the sessions has been very informative. If there is anything that I would have to say about the sessions, if there was a final feedback survey, is that there needs to be some attention to the following:

• Starting on time - If people are late, let them join in, but start at the start time, or people will think it is fine to show up late all the time.  Then the rest of the session is squeezed for time or we run over time.
• Use of Technology - The room is equipped with technology, have the local tech support review how to use it with the presenters. This will allow them to present more effectively, as they will not be “worried” about the mouse etc.
• Powerpoint - Do not read the slides word for word, allow them to be a supplement behind the presenter.  Do not have the slides too wordy.  Remove animated gifs.

Tags: Adoption, training, PRIDE, Children’s Aid Society

Lately I have not been in a regular blog rhythm…some of that can be attributed to Twitter, I use Twitter a lot more and short posts that may have been done on the blog are now on Twitter.  So if you read this blog and are not following me on Twitter, check it out and subscribe to my Twitter feed.

Here is a quick list of things that have been going on. in my life. Blogging has be slower lately, which is odd because I am on the laptop so much. I am going to try to give a recap post for each of the following this week; hopefully that will get me into a regular rhythm again.

1. Cornwall - The past few weekends we have been going down to Cornwall preaching in the services there.  This past weekend, the kids were away, so my wife and I went down on Saturday night and stayed over in Massena, NY.
2. Adoption Training - Each Wednesday evening and this past Saturday (all-day) we have been going through the PRIDE adoption training.  We have also had homework after each session to complete….some weeks it is more then others.
3. Adoption Meetings with Case Worker - We had a couple meetings with our case worker, one being with interviews with our children.
4. Catalyst - The weekends that we are not down in Cornwall, Catalyst is held.
5. BMX Season Wrap-Up - We have completed the BMX Season, and I am wrapping up the loose ends and preparing for the AGM at the end of September.

Tags: Cornwall, Adoption training, PRIDE, Catalyst, BMX, Massena NY

Last night my wife and I after church had the opportunity to talk with an older couple in our church that adopted a child over 30 years ago. They are actually this week going to visit the birth mother in British Columbia. They shared some of the experiences they had over the years. 

They have been open with their son from day one that he was adopted.  Later in his life he decided to contact his birth mother, what stuck out to me as they explained this was how their son honored them through this process.  He wanted them to understand that even when he made contact with her, that they were still his parents and that would never change. 

They were excited to know that we have started the process of adoption. They told us that the experience has been absolutely magnificent for them.

This coming Wednesday, we have our second training session; actually it will be session 3 as Saturday was considered two sessions.

Tags: adoption, family

Today we had our first sessions for our adoption training, called PRIDE. We started at 9am and ended at 4pm, and yes it was a long day. There was some group work, interactive communication between the group and instructor, and we have homework to complete for Wednesday night. There were 16 people in our session today, with 4-6 people absent (they will have to make up the sessions). We also have a lot of reading to do, the training material they handed out, the instructor called it a brick.

The training is not just for Adoption parents, but also Foster and Kinship parents. I find the training geared more to Foster parents so far. There were less adoption parents then both Foster and Kinship in our group.

Here are some stats on Ottawa that stuck out to me today:

Families Receiving Services from CAS: 1965
Children in Ottawa CAS Care: 850
Children Who are Crown Wards: 410
Kinship Homes: 30
Foster Homes: 201
Adoptive Homes Available and in Use: 66

Tomorrow our case worker comes over to our house to begin our homestudy process. In a couple of weeks we also start the PRIDE education sessions.

Today my wife and I had to go back to CAS Ottawa to meet with our new case worker. Our previous one changed jobs so we were reassigned.  We basically had to go back through the same questions as the first interview with our first case worker. 

We also found out that we have been slotted into the Adoption training program - PRIDE.  We are also going to be going through the SAFE Home Study.  This starts in 3 weeks.

Tags: Adoption, Case Worker, CAS, CAS Ottawa, PRIDE Training, SAFE Home Study

After returning home from the zoo in Syracuse, NY, and when watching the Olympics my wife says, “I wish we knew what was happening in our life right now.”  Let me explain where this comes:

• Adoption - We have not heard back anything since we had all the references sent into the Children’s Aid Society. The person we were working with this went on vacation in July, and was supposed to get in contact with us to start the home study.  We will have to contact them and see what is going on.
• Meeting with Pastor - I few weeks ago I posted on a meeting with Jeremy (Associate Pastor).  The next step has happened, he brought this up in a meeting to the Senior Pastor.  Our Senior Pastor is praying about this, and will be contacting us in the future.  This has to do with a calling and a big vision.  Please pray that things work out the way they are intended. I feel very strongly that this is a God thing happening.

Tags: adoption, calling, pastor

Today we received a call from the Ottawa Children’s Aid society that a case worker has been assigned to our file.

We have to go into the CAS next Thursday and meet with her.  I am not sure the next steps, but this is one in the right direction.

Tags: Ottawa, Children’s Aid Society, Adoption, Case worker

I know I said this post was going to appear a couple of days ago, but been busy getting some things done since we got back from Florida.  This weekend is the BMX club’s opening weekend, so that has made it a little more busy then usual.

This post is going to highlight what we had to go through to submit our papers to the Ottawa Children’s Aid Society to start the adoption process.

We received the papers from the information night, and brought them home.  We went through them a first time, and talked about the adoption process some more.  We put the papers aside for a while to continue to discuss how we were going to fill them out.  Sometimes if you rush through it and do not give it the proper thought process you can give a knee jerk reaction to some of the questions we felt. We also wanted to discuss this process with our three children.  We also wanted to approach that in the right way as well.  So we let a few months pass before we took the papers out again.

(I will post on our discussion with our children in the future.)

When we took the papers out again, there was a lot of information that both my wife and I had to fill out.  For instance:

• Our relationship with our mother and father as children, and now as adults
• How we parent today
• Personal characteristics of each other and ourselves. 
• and much more

I was surprised at the level of detail we had to fill out in these questionnaires.

We also had to fill out forms on the profile of the child we would consider adopting, for instance would we consider adopting a child that:

• there was little or no information or medical history on the birth father or the birth mother or both.
• that was at risk for fetal alcohol syndrome
• that had a variety of different medical possibilities.
• that had certain known medical conditions, such as diabetes, asthma etc..
• and much more

Again, these were very detailed questions.

We also had to indicate the various cultures that we would consider.   And if there was a preference for a boy or a girl, and the age of the child, and would we consider adopting siblings.

Then there were the personal references that we had to include.  We each had to provide a long time friend, a long time couple that we were friends with as well and a family member.  So we selected the individuals and then starting contacting them to let them know we needed them as references. 

My wife selected her brother and friend Sue from the old neighborhood.  I selected my good friend Tony and my younger sister.  We then selected Jer and Karina (Associate Pastor) as our long time couple’s friend.  When talked to each individual and everything went very good with them, they all agreed to be our references and were very positive towards the journey we were taking. 

So we sent the information into the Children’s Aid Society and called them a couple of days later to see if they received it. We were told that they would review it, and then they would decide if they would assign us to a case worker to process our papers or if we would be on a waiting list.

After a few days we found out that because we were living in Rockland we were out of the region of the Ottawa Children’s Aid Society. We would have to contract the Prescott Russell agency and ask them to forward a letter to Ottawa CSA approving us to work with the Ottawa CAS.  This is something that we did not expect.  We were a little discouraged because we had went through all this work to this point and thought we might have to start from square one again.

We called the Prescott Russell CAS and they were kind of wanting us to stick with them and go through the process of adoption with them.  They told us that their process was a little different then the Ottawa CAS, and they had needs for adoption for children over the age of 5.  However, if we wanted to continue the process we had already started with Ottawa CAS, then they would forward the letter. 

So we took a couple of days to talk it over and make the decision.  After talking about it a couple of times,  praying about it, both my wife and I felt we should continue the process we started with Ottawa CAS.

My wife called Prescott CAS and asked them to forward the letter to Ottawa CAS, and they did.

Tags: adoption, Ottawa Children’s Aid Society, Ottawa CAS, Prescott Russel Children’s Aid Soceity, CAS

Well my wife and I are back from our trip to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  We had a great time on vacation, just kicked back and relaxed for five days.  Didn’t bring the laptop or connect via any Internet device the whole time, it was a nice break.

This next post on our adoption journey is on the information night we had to attend a few months ago at the Ottawa Children’s Aid Society.

To be honest we were nervous going to this.  We did not know what to expect.  We had not spoken to anyone about this journey, just discussed between ourselves because we wanted to find out more information then what we had researched on our own on the Internet. 

We arrived early.  And then watched the room fill with couples from every demographic.  There were more people there then I expected.  We “looked,” to me, to be one of the youngest couples in the room.  One of the things that I noticed.  I will stop here and ask for whoever is reading this not to post negative comments about the next point, I am just pointing out an observation to what I noticed.  This is not a forum for debate or comments on the legal or moral issue the reader has in the matter.  I noticed that there was almost a 50/50 split on the heterosexual and homosexual couples looking into adoption.

The information that was shared was very informative.  We learned a lot about the process the Children’s Aid Society goes through in the adoption process.  We learned a lot about the need of the Children’s Aid Society has right now for children in the city of Ottawa.  That actually shocked us, we knew there would be a lot of children, but I didn’t think there were that many. 

The presenter told us some storied of cases she had been involved in having to remove children from their birth parents and place them temporarily in foster homes. 

There was also a lady that presented that had already ready went through the adoption process about a year ago.  She was able to share what it was like to be in our position.  All the questions, and fears etc.  This was very helpful. She was very open to sharing her feelings through the process her family went through. 

The information night in all was good, and was helpful to us.  We got some information to take home and ready through.  And also all the papers to fill out.  My next post will detail the paperwork we had to fill out.  I plan on posting on that tomorrow.

Tags: adoption, Children’s Aid Society, Ottawa, public adoption

This post will outline one of the steps that we have went through already on this new journey of adoption. 

The first step that we had to determine, after making the decision for family to pursue adoption of a child, was what type of adoption. 

So we starting to research our options for our location in the Ottawa region of Ontario.  For those US readers, some the terminology may or may not be the same, so I will post in the terminology that I am familiar with.

The options that we looked into were as follows:

• Foreign Adoption
• Private Adoption
• Public Adoption through the Children’s Aid Society

Everyone that is considering adoption will be different in the type of adoption they would like to pursue.  We really did consider all the options.  We have read different stories that people have shared about their process, a couple of examples are Carlos Whittaker (Ragamuffin Soul) & Heather Whittaker and Jonathan Herron & Amber Herron.

For instance for both foreign adoption and private adoption there are fees, and for foreign adoption it depends on the country that you select to apply to.  The fees can be substantial. There are also fees for private adoption.  So we discussed how we could handle one of these options were to be what we decided to pursue.  One of things that I found out was that my employer would provide a benefit of around $5000 towards the adoption expenses.  We looked into the countries that we could adopt from as citizens of Canada. We looked into different domestic private agencies and what it would take to adopt via their agency etc.

We also looked into the Children’s Aid Society and public adoption. We were not as familiar with this adoption option.  So we read the material on the Children’s Aid Society website.  We found out that there was a information session on the first Thursday of every month.   So we went.  It was very informative.  The staff shared their process, their need.  They had a lady talk about her family’s experience going through the process of adoption and the children that were now in their family. 

So we took some time to think about our options. After sometime we decided that we would go the route of public adoption through the Children’s Aid Society.

Tags: adoption, Children’s Aid Society, Heather Whittaker, Carlos Whittaker, Ragamuffin Soul, Jonathan Herron, Amber Herron, public adoption, private adoption, foreign adoption

I posted last week about a new category of posts that I will be tracking on this blog.  I thought of creating a side blog that would contain just those posts, but I figured I may as well just incorporate them on my main blog here.

Sometime ago my wife and I began discussing something that would be be a new journey for our family. I first posted about here in my 2007 Recap, however it was just a brief statement.  Today I am going to post more specifics.

I am going to be blogging about a journey of adoption for our family.  We have decided to pursue the opportunity of adopting a child into our family, and becoming a forever family for a child that is waiting to be adopted. 

This is something that we have been looking into for quite a while and lines up with a couple of things. One being, expanding our family from the current number of five.  The other being seeing the need of adoption and connecting it with our faith. 

I have been speaking/teaching on a couple of social justice issues over the past while and will be starting a new series in Catalyst on social justice after “God is Green”.  It has been incredible to study what the scriptures teach on areas such as this, and then have a desire to live those out in your own life, not just teach about them.

So, over the next while I will be blogging specifics about this journey…so those readers that stop by will be able to experience this journey in a Web 2.0 social media way. Also, it will allow us to come back and revisit our journey in the future.  It will also be a way to process some of what we will experience. 

My next post will go through the steps that we have completed thus far in the journey.

Tags: Adoption, social justice, family, forever family