Pre-Adoption Workshop Today!

Through the treacherous weather and having to use a back-up to the back-up for childcare (which worked out really well anyway especially because of the icy roads - we used our next door neighbor - THANK YOU KATY, JENNIFER, AND LEE!) we made it to the Pre-Adoption Workshop. We learned quite a bit, but still have some questions which I'm sure will be answered in time. Going into this I wasn't really totally set on China, but after today I am! I just had a peace about me after hearing all the case workers talk about the other country programs (Haiti, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, and China) I just knew China was it. Good thing! I would have had to change this whole blog thing up! Anyway, we met some really cool people both first time adoptive families and returning adopting families. This is really going to change our life, not just in the sense of adding a family member, but we are going to need to become half Chinese in a sense! They really emphasize you getting involved with organizations celebrating your child's birth country culture and the post-adoption services also supporting your child's birth country (which was one of the deciding factors for us in choosing Dillon, our adoption agency) which we really agree that that is what needs to be done. We were also told by a second time adoptive mother that we need to just look at one piece of paper at a time, not the whole stack because if you look at the whole stack you will get dizzy and overwhelmed. Thankfully, the application we are working on now will be very similar to our Dossier, so we won't have to do a bunch of new and unknown paperwork. I finally feel like we are on our way!