What a day, what a day. School is officially over and done with until August...yeah! The life of a teacher...

Ill just try to touch on the highlights of our meeting last night but first must say how overwhelming it was. Ive never been given so much paperwork and we will have to have it all completed by the end of the class. The paperwork included things such as 5 letters of recommendation, how we are to discipline our kids (how can we really know this??), employment verification, our entire life history (our parents, relationships, what we remember good and bad about growing up and why). There are a few more but I cant seem to remember them all now.

The meeting lasted the entire 3 hrs pretty much I think we were let out about 5 min early. We covered so much material! I did find it interesting that our class consisted of 3 couples + us + 3 single women. The single women I kind of have a problem with (well 2 of them) because they are just looking to collect another welfare check and get another kid. This issue really just burns me up to no end but Ill stop there with it.

We watched two videos (one about adoption/fostering), another about the benefits of being a foster parent. The videos were very old and seemed way out of date I must admit but it did relay the message.

The part I did not care for about this meeting was it was geared heavily towards fostering which we are not interested in so to some extent the class was almost boring. Most of the people were not interested in fostering either so Im not sure why it was so heavily geared towards fostering. I walked away from the meeting not learning a ton about adoption but learning a good bit about fostering.

I did feel good about our chances though of adopting if the people that were in our class are what we are competing against. 2 of the 3 couples were a lot older than us, and the other was a bit older, then you have the 3 single women as well.

Things I learned
-telephone service (we have cell phones but the guy running the class said it has to be a land line, don't quite get this)
-it is highly recommended you only have one adoption application at a time
-you can not have even an infant stay in the same room as you, they must have their own room
-state will only allow you to have 5 kids (one couple has 4 kids and they wanted to adopt 2 and they said the max was 5)
-how can you lay out a specific plan for a child you do not have such as chores, money, etc.
Seems like there is some other things but cant think of it now.

Also figured out that the people running the class just seem so disorganized. After hearing stories though from the two that were doing the class it really made me realize why we are going through adoption, its so sad to hear and truly breaks my heart.

Thought this was interesting that for the state and adoption they place a parent to a child and at an agency its the reversed.

Hopefully tonight will be geared towards adoption and not fostering Im hoping. Last night was very frustrating to drive over an hour to hear about fostering practically for almost 3 hrs.

Any questions please ask away I know there are some things that I have left out, it was just so overwhelming to sit through that class and see everything and I know I cant remember everything.

Our next class is in less than 3 hrs, seems like this day has flown by