[coffee_please]

Originally Posted by kune

KIRSTY

Congratulations!!! Have you got a photo of the cover you can scan so we can all see??

I have no idea what the waiting for a child is like but I guess it is like walking a tightrope. Full of hopes and dreams, and a few fears thrown in to keep you on your toes. Keep your positive attitude - (I like your idea of being a little different). Nothing to loose and lots to gain. I'll keep watching for an update.

Cheers

Ann

The only way I could think of to show you the painting was to quickly put together a personal page on yahoo. I will attach a link to the page. This is where I have downloaded a photo of the painting to. Let me know what you think.

http://www.geocities.com/ coffee_please2003/coffee_please2003.html

[kune]

Kirsty
Well done - I think its great. (Even signed your guestbook)

I'll keep my fingers and toes crossed for you both -

Ann

[Richie68]

Well done Kirsty

Love the picture and yes it is an excellent point of difference. Something like that, I think, will make people (birth mums) stop and look. Well done what an excellent idea. You really were thinking outside the box.

I'm glad you asked those tough questions and I would love to know their feedback on numbers adopted in your region. It's exciting to know that it has already been viewed and interesting that they could not tell you if your profile was "out" at the moment. Our profile was "out" for a while with someone that had chosen us. Unfortunately (or fortunately for her) she kept the baby. I remember being very excited by this (even though we had missed out) as I felt well if she liked us maybe someone else will - and I was right - our beautiful son Jack being a testimony to that fact. Keep us informed it is all very very exciting. I'm feeling good vibes about all this.

Richie

[loubielou]

Ouch - lost a post

Briefly if I can remember...- yah Kirsty - I think that picture is great, really unusual and eye-catching. Great idea. It can be hard to find something original that really says who you are.

Would love to see the stats if you get something. Perhaps you could put some on here. We are in Auckland too, so I would be keen to hear.

That's about it. No changes here.

Take care everyone and hope the new year brings us all a bundle of joy

[Richie68]

Hi Louise Long time no hear. Hope you are well and that you have had a great break. How has it been going? Obviously no news (we wait with crossed fingers) and have you been proactive like Coffee_Please (Kirsty) and been ringing CYFS to see how your profile has been getting on? We'd love to know. )

richie

[coffee_please]

Hi Guys,

I've just downloaded the Adoption Stats to my website, as I know some of you are keen to see these. Just follow the link below to my website, and then follow the link on my website called "New Zealand Adoption Statistics".

Kirsty

http://www.geocities.com/coffee_plea...lease2003.html

[loubielou]

Thanks Kirsty. Wow, there has been a placement in Auckland already this year huh?
It looks like we are statistically lucky to live in Auckland too as there were 20/60 placements here last year.

Ritchie, no I'm not being proactive at all. Think about phoning my s/w from time to time, but figure she is busy and really it's not going to make a difference anyway.
I want it so bad! It's best for me to put it to the back of my mind (do you believe me? truth is that's impossible) ....well at least not to dwell on it too much, to keep busy and try to enjoy life.

Take care everyone. Keep posting

[loubielou]

I should add that we are in the pool, maybe that wasn't clear, which is why I don't feel like there is any point in ringing the s/w. In fact in March we will have to renew our profile as it will have been 2 years (tho we only got accepted and finished our profile in in Nov of 2004 the 2 years is taken from way back in March when we first approached CYF's).

[Richie68]

Thanks Kirsty for those statistics. It was very very interesting to read them. Thanks for passing them on. It was very interesting them especially the average age as I was 35 and my husband had just turned 38 (avg was F 35 M 37). Also interesting seeing it broken down by ethnicity. Our son is puposedly Maori / European.


Louise I cannot reiterate enough about the power of networking. I'm hoping your'll back me up here Kirsty in saying how beneficial it has been, for you, catching up with your social worker and finding out what is happening with your profile. So I hope it all goes well for your meeting in March - don't forget to ask lots of questions and don't be afraid to ask the difficult ones. You might be very pleasantly surprised of what feedback you have had. I know Kirsty and I were very pleased. Let us know how you get on

Take care all of you - I have my fingers crossed every day - hoping today will be the day for you.

Richie

[coffee_please]

With regards to networking the way I look at it is this, the whole process of selecting adoptive parents (in NZ) is very manual. You rely solely on your s/w and other s/w’s showing your profile to birth parents. This is the only way you can be selected. I believe that by keeping in touch with them regularly (every few months), they will never have a chance to forget us. I want to be in the front of their minds when they are reaching into their filing cabinet grabbing those profiles out to show. For this reason, I also think it’s important to speak to a number of different s/w’s. Your s/w will not get to meet every birth parent. I personally think a s/w will show the profile of a couple they “know” before a couple they don’t. I don’t actually know if this is the case, but when I sit down and think about it, it really makes sense to me. It may not be a conscious decision, but I know that if I was sitting at a computer trying to find the best possible fit in an adoptive family for a birth mother, I would first scan my brain for couples before I would scan a database. I think it would be an automatic response. Basically, I think there is a point and a real benefit in contacting your s/w every few months, even if it’s just for 10 mins. I know when I ring my s/w, I say, “Hi its Kirsty” and she knows who I am, without me having to go into more detail. I don’t have a particularly recognisable voice, so when this happens, it says to me that I have not been forgotten.

Loubie, how often do you hear from you s/w? When I called our s/w recently, she said that if she hadn’t of heard from us by the end of the week, she was going to call us herself just to touch base. Now it had probably been only 2-months since we had spoken and when I think about it, we probably do hear from her every couple of months. Is this normal (anyone)?

[loubielou]

OK - I hear ya! I hadn't thought about it like that. I rang our sw back in July to say we were going away for a couple of weeks but that we would still be "available" and contactable if anything came up. Haven't heard anything since. So, I will call her tomorrow. Even if just to touch base, wish her a happy new year and remind her we exist.


Will let you know if she says anything interesting.

Lou

[nzraven]

Well, another newbie here, I too have read through all of the posts with interest, ours is quite a frustrating and sad tale as well. I have had eight miscarriages, I have two children from a previous marriage who are now 21 and 18, they grew up with myself and my husband and introduce him to people they meet as their father, even though they don't call him Dad. My husband has no children of his own, my two boys were 7 and 10 when we first met. All my husband has wanted is a child to call him dad, and when we first got together and had our second miscarriage we started investigating fertility issues. We were told there were problems with both of us, and when our IVF was unsuccessful we decided to try adoption. This was four years ago. We have since found out that people are being given a second cycle FOC, but the second one must be within three years of the first one, and because we never knew about this, we have missed the boat by a year and are now no longer entitled to the second cycle, plus my age is now a determining factor. I have not told my husband that we missed the boat on that one...it would break his heart.

We went on the two day adoption course and during the course the social worker told us if there are things in your past that you are not proud of, or things that you might not normally share, mistakes you have made, they are important to put in our profile, I won't mention what it was but we were told if we had these experiences in our past, we should put them in as the birth mothers could relate to us because of it. We were told it makes us look more human to the birth mothers and less saintly, so they might be able to relate more to us than to be intimidated by us, it was nothing big, in our opinion, and as I said in our profile, it was in the past, just an experience we had had.
We went into the pool and had similar delays in getting our profile into the pool, but finally got in just over six months after initially making the decision to adopt. Our social worker's supervisor read our profile, saw the comment I had put in, and didn't take into account it was in the past and totally took the comment out of context, and because of what I believe to be her personal beliefs she caused a huge stink, and got us taken out of the pool.

We were dumbstruck as we had been advised by the social worker on the course to put these comments in our profile and then were being punished for something we were advised to do...something I might add, after fighting against our expulsion from the pool with our lawyer, (we found out by our lawyer interviewing other social workers nationally), that other prospective parents had put this same item in their profile and had not only been accepted into the pool, but had been selected by birth mothers to receive adopted children. After finding this out, we appealed at a national level with our lawyers help and after nearly two years we were accepted back into the pool. We were told by this same social worker before being accepted back into the pool, that we would be required to go through further testings before being allowed back into the pool, which of course we gladly agreed to, and would also be called on at any time for further testing, however our lawyer advised us that we were not required to do so as this was discrimination, and we were allowed back into the pool, much to the disappointment of the social worker.

So...to be honest, over those few years we changed, we became cynical, I thought we were good people, but after the treatment we had received from this person I came to believe my husband and I were not good people and didn't deserve to adopt. Thanks to our supportive family and friends who helped us through this every step of the way, we were convinced not to give up.

We are hard workers, we have jumped through every hoop, we made one mistake, we have never been convicted of a crime, we have never abused our children. I argued that speeding is an offence and speeding kills and yet every adoptive parent isn't rejected from the pool for having a speeding ticket, but in the end I think it came down to this person just not liking us.
Once getting back into the pool and waiting and waiting, we decided we should give up hope of local and try overseas as we couldn't be sure that our profile was even being shown, but we had a meeting with our new social worker...who by the way is wonderful, (what a novelty to not be treated like a leper), and our social worker told us maybe we should hold tight in the local pool just a bit longer, and instead of talking to us as though we were common criminals, she has been really nice to us.
My husband and I have raised two exceptional boys, gifted, intellegent, successfully employed, our friends are always commenting at how well balanced and wonderful our two boys are, and constantly come to us for parenting advice. My husband has raised the boys as though they were his own, we would give anything to parent a child together. We have been married for ten years next month and are so happy together. We are grateful for our two boys who wanted to speak out on our behalf during this trying ordeal, they are still very supportive of our decision to stay in the pool and can't wait to have a little brother or sister.

We have not had a support group as we live in a small town, and the only other couple we knew adopted locally from their church in the first few months and we have sadly not kept in touch. My heart goes out to you, to see the trials others have gone through to get into the pool, and it makes me feel good to know we are not alone.

Well, this is a long letter, and something I have not talked about with anyone other than my family and friends, we just try to keep a brave face and constantly reassure ourselves we are good people and we deserve a child to love and raise as I am sure all adoptive parents deserve.

I look forward to hearing success stories from the parents in waiting on this thread, and fingers crossed we will be able to have some good news ourselves.

[loubielou]

Hi all - welcome raven, your story sounds soooooooo frustrating, and unjust. I remember on our education days they made a big deal about sharing even negative parts of your past (like convictions) and we talked about how to write things like that in our profiles if we needed to, - HOW MEAN to turn against you when you are honest and do what they asked in the first place. Thank goodness you found a good lawyer! I hope you continue to post on here. It is nice to have people who know where you're coming from isnt it?

Well, I spoke to my sw yesterday and our profile has only been shown twice which was disappointing. We knew about the first time, and that we were chosen and mum decided to keep baby, so in over a year it has only been shown one more time. It is mainly because they havent had many European babies to place, and because we were particular about mum not using drugs or alcohol. So, we wait and hope. We need to update our 'stuff' in March, so something to focus on I guess.

Take care out there. Keep posting!
Lou

[Richie68]

Firstly welcome to Raven. Nice to have another person to our group. Any old timers (from our forum) please drop us a line and let us know how you are getting on. Especially you Australians.

Raven I'm so glad that things have finally sorted themselves out. It's such a horrific time as it is without everything else on top. I'm so pleased that you have a supportive Social Worker now - that is sooo important. We too had to put some hard facts into our profile which initially I was against. But strangely enough those facts helped seal the deal (so to speak). So they are right about making you appear more real - shame the former SW could not see that.

Louise I am so so pleased that you contacted your Social Worker - I know how much Dutch courage that takes (speaking from experience). This is now a great chance for you to find out why you are not capturing your target market (so to speak). Also isn't that great your profile has been out there. I asked for my Social Worker to get feedback from the other Social Workers about where we could improve our profile. That was a huge help and we made some pretty major changes. Whilst I fully support and understand your decision on drugs and alcohol please do remember that this may cancel you out of everything. Our birth mum did drink a little bit when she was pregnant but not too excess - we were made aware of this beforehand and I would have been concerned if it was "excessive". We ticked a lot of the "maybe" boxes and that actually helped us go forward to finally adopting our child. I hope it was a positive conversation with your social worker and remember we're here to help you also so just fire us a line.

Richie68

[nzraven]

Hi all thanks for the positive feedback!!! It feels great to get it all off my chest and get a bit of closure, funny how telling people who are in the same boat can give you closure when family and friends who are so supportive can't do the same, I guess I feel they don't understand the situation we are in, they all have their children. We too have selected the maybe boxes, because from my understanding there are many tests that can be done in the twelve days before they are handed over to assure us the child is healthy, and we thought that we could still have the option for a healthy child. I am so excited to have some one out there to chat with about adoption with. I was thinking about it, our close friends and family love us very much and it's almost like I see a kind of grief in their faces when I talk to them about our adoption, keeping them updated. My husband and I try to stay positive, and for us, talking about it helps, but I guess our friends feel bad for us. I always want them to ask how it's going but instead it's almost like they avoid the subject. I think it's great to have a forum here where everyone can support everyone else and we all know how each other feels.

Has anyone had any experience with permanent placement? I have met two people, one with a positive experience and one with a negative, would love to hear any other feedback as my husband and I have gone into a local permanent placement pool. I know the child is not legally ours by adoption but I know of one lady who has been through it twice and has eventually managed to adopt one of her children so far.