Lot of interesting things in the adoption training. Some of the training felt kind of useless and some of it my wife and I even disagreed with, but overall it was a lot of good stuff.Lots of good info on attachment with the child. One of their recommendations seemed pretty extreme though. Although we both agreed that if, after further research, it seemed like this was the typical recommendation, that we would go ahead and do it. They said that once we get back, there should be NO contact with anyone else for the first two weeks. No family or friends should be allowed to meet the child, no taking the child outside of the house, just contact between parents and child. They said that this was crucial to creating the attachment between child and caregiver, otherwise the child may be confused and not create the needed attachment between child and parents.There also was a lot of good information about traveling. For some reason I hadn't though about starting to get immunizations done already. But some of those need to be done quite a bit in advance. It also included good perspectives on how different things are going to seem for our child at first and how much of an adjustment it will be. Some of it I hadn't really considered before. The food will be different, the language will be different, many sights and sounds will be different, etc. Another thing that we didn't particularly like was the admonition that we essentially needed to move to an area that is predominantly our child's culture, send him/her to a school with children predominantly of that culture, and make new friends that are all that culture. I'm fully ok with exposing our child to his cultural background, but I refuse to pigeonhole him/her. If he/she is curious and wants to learn more, we'll do whatever we can to foster that. But ultimately, we want our child to feel like his skin color and the way he looks is a physical trait more than anything else.
Congrats.We're still doing paperwork, and paperwork, and more paperwork. It has been determined that we are not criminals or child abusers, and we have the documents to prove it. We meet with our agency this Friday or next and start actually preparing for the interview/home study process. It's going slowly, but it's moving along.
It will definitely be a challenge if it works out, but I know we have lots of people who will help us out when we need it.
