Turn to the Left and Cough.....

Doc, you're hands are freezing!  Can you please help a brother out by warming those bad boys up before you tell me to "drop my drawers" and go in for the exam......down there!  In addition to the physical, I was grilled on everything from my bowel health to giving myself testicular exams.  Ugh, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. The worst part of this application process is over if you ask me. 

I had a 10:00 am physical and was told I needed to fast for 12 hours prior to the physical.  Considering I wake up at 4:15 am every weekday morning, I knew waiting until after my 10:00 am physical was done would be a make me one cranky bastard!  And boy was I right!!  I was in a state of dizzy delirium by the time the appointment was over at 10:45.  And in addition to fasting, I couldn't even eat gum.  I was rocking some serious hungry/bad breath in that tiny doctor's office.  Both the nurse and doctor wanted to have in-depth conversations face-to-face with me and I wonder if they could smell it.  I wanted to die!

I got a tetnus shot, had my cholesterol checked, and then was tested for a wheat allergy.   I have been given a clean bill of health and according to my doctor, fit to be a parent.  Let's hope some birth mother feels the same.  Jon was given a clean bill of health too.  One part of the application down.....598 to go!

Here a Form, There a Form, Everywhere a Form, Form!!

Oh my God!  How many times can two individuals fill out their address or sign their names?  Jon said that if we open our own adoption agency someday, we should figure out a way to auto-populate repeat information onto multiple forms (name, address, phone number, etc.).  I think he may be on to something here! 

Jon and I have been deluged in forms from both our adoption agency and our home study agency.  Our kitchen table, which comfortably seats 6, now uncomfortably seats stacks and stacks of folders, forms, and miscellaneous papers.  If I think about it long enough, I feel completely and utterly overwhelmed and unprepared.  But then I let "Organizational Keith" step in and come to the rescue.  Even though Jon rarely enjoys seeing "Organizational Keith" because it usually indicates he will be asked to help reorganize a closet, help alphabetize our spices, or help clean our cleaning supplies, I think even he was happy to see "Organizational Keith."  We needed someone to make order out of all of the paperwork chaos!  Thank God for sticky notes and paperclips.  And thank God that while I can organize like a son of a gun, Jon is better at translating what some of the questions actually mean versus what I think they mean.  We make a great team in that regard!

I would roughly estimate we have 75 pages of forms and paperwork to fill out and gather.  Some self-explanatory, but also some things I never imagined we would need:

• Autobiographies
• Doctor's Physical & Clearance
• Police Clearance
• Fingerprint Samples
• Family Disaster Plan (in case our house catches fire, gets picked up in a tornado, etc.)
• In-Depth House/Neighborhood/Family Description Forms
• Criminal and Credit Background Checks
• 8 Reference letters (5 for one agency, 3 for the other)
• A Budget (on each agency's individual forms)
• Applications/Intake Forms
• Policies/Practices/Procedure Documents
• On and on and on and on and on.........

We aim at completing a few forms a week as to not make ourselves crazy, but some (like the budget) are harder than others because they require you to "estimate" baby costs.  When  you don't have a baby and have never had a baby, estimating baby costs seems like an impossible task.  We could ask our moms I guess, but something tells me the cost of baby food and diapers has gone up since the 70's. 

We continue to plug away and hope to be finished with our forms packets for both agencies by the end of August. 

It is always good to have a goal I guess.....

Autobiographies

As part of our application process for the agency, Jon and I are required to write our autobiographies. This task seemed easy enough until they tell you that you cannot exceed four pages and that you have to hit several of the following talking points:

• Your year of birth
• Your childhood and upbringing, including family dynamics
• Your education and career path
• Your special skills, interests, or passions
• Any chronic or serious health issues
• Your faith, religion, and/or values
• Your greatest satisfactions and disappointments
• Marriages, significant relationships, children
• The people, events, or ideas that have had the biggest impact on your life (good and bad)

Since these autobiographies will be one of the first things that a potential birth parent will read to learn more about you when they are making the life changing decision of who should have their baby, it was both challenging and terrifying to sum up your life in two to four pages. Jon and I wanted to ensure that our lives did not come off smelling like roses (as nobody's has or actually does) though we don't want to overemphasize the bad stuff either and look miserable with life (not that we are, except maybe at really hard times).

Here is the summarized versions (click on the links and they take a few second to open) of our lives up to the point that we are moving forward with an adoption:

• Keith's Autobiography
• Jon's Autobiography

Home Study or "How Jon, Keith, and Their House Will Not Purposely Harm a Child"

As part of the adoption process, Jon and I have to complete a home study. According to Wikipedia.org, a home study is "a screening of the home and life of prospective adoptive parents prior to allowing an adoption to take place."

What does this mean for Jon and I? That a social worker will come into our home between one and three times to make sure our house is not a giant death trap. Additionally, in many cases they will come back for subsequent visits to interview Jon and I together and separately regarding our lives, our ambitions, our desires for having a child, and our plan for the child's immediate and long term future.

Here is where the complicated part comes in. Since there is no law the explicitly states that adoption for same-sex couples is legal or illegal in MN, we have to be very careful how we approach the home study. Ultimately, the home study company in MN will write up our home study report and send it to our adoption agency on the west coast which is what will be used to make sure our home is not a portal into the fiery pits of Hell and "clear" us for entering the pool of candidates to be chosen by a birth parent. From our understanding up till now, we have two options (which I am abbreviating in an extreme fashion below):

1. Find a home study agency in MN that will write the home study report listing us both as "Prospective Adoptive Fathers." This way, when we work with our west coast adoption agency, the laws of those states (which are far more liberal than MN) will allow Jon and I both to be listed on the birth certificate as the father and we will not have to do any legal tightrope walking in MN. Seems easy enough, right? Well, the problem is that most adoption agencies or home study agencies have an emphasis on religion. Most come with awesome names like ABC Christian Services, Catholic Charities of MN, Lutheran Social Services, etc. Out of about 48 agencies we found in MN, only three responded yes, they may perform a service like this.
2. If #1 doesn't pan out and a home study agency is only willing to write one of us up as the prospective adoptive father, then only one of us can legally adopt the child. We would then have to come back to MN, wait a certain amount of time and then go before a circuit court judge who would make the decision as to whether the second parent should be legally added on or not. What if the judge is Conservative?  What is the judge is anti-gay?  What if the judge has a Long Island Ice Tea hangover?  What if the judge has diarrhea and wants to make a quick decision to get to the nearest bathroom?  Ugh, we do not want to go this route.

So, we are in the process of looking at costs and determining which one of the three home study agencies in MN will be meet our needs and pray that one of them will write our home study up under the circumstances of #1 and not #2.

Bummer Dude!

Looks like the September seminar filled up (as our contact was out of the office yesterday when we accepted) and so we have to wait until about the third week of October. Boo hiss!

Agency Number Two - The Call

Well, we expected to have a little bit more emotional control on call #2, but alas, this did not happen! Okay, maybe I shouldn't say "we" as much as "I" because Jon was able to scarf down a packet of peanut butter crackers 2 seconds before the call. I think he was trying to play it cool though. Me, I was shuttering like a leave and it felt like someone was shooting fireworks off inside my body. So, how did it go?

AMAZING. AWESOME. PERFECTLY

Agency Two made our decision VERY easy. There were so many advantages to this agency, but the main positive point was that our guts told us this agency was right. The Client Manager was a wonderful woman who answered so many of our questions and went above and beyond the call of duty in regards to the information she gave us. Unlike the Agency One, she looked up if any birth mothers from their agency had selected a same-sex couple in the state of MN before. And guess what, there had been two!! And the people lived only a few miles from us. She passed on our contact information to them and we are hoping they contact us so we can hear about their journey and take any pointers from them.

The ONLY unfortunate thing about this agency is that they only take birth mothers from two west coast states, whereas Agency One took birth mothers from any U.S. state. This significantly reduces our exposure as Agency One places about 200 children a year, whereas Agency Two only places about 40 to 60 children a year. However, Jon and I do truly believe a few things:

1. Quality over quantity. You cannot replace a feeling in your gut that one Agency is a better fit for you than another.
2. It is all part of a master plan. We chose the agency that we felt was right for us and if we don't get a baby as a result, we won't regret it. At least we can say we tried it the right way.
3. The pool of available adoptive parents is going to be smaller with a smaller agency.

This agency is located on the West Coast and our next step is an adoption seminar that takes place over two days in September where we get all of our questions answered. They bring in lawyers, parents who have adopted children from their agency, birth mothers who have given their children up for adoption, etc. We also will have to officially interview to be accepted into the agency. Our calls to these agencies were our chance to interview them, but now the tables get turned.

Time to make some travel plans, start ramping up on our reading, and preparing ourselves to answer the most difficult questions of all.......how is that for a cliffhanger?