Had a fairly rotten holiday and have come back to a load of Very Urgent emails and a horrible cold. I can't really be bothered to tell you all the details but lots of drains, trains and sniffing.
I think we are now relatively sure that we don't want to give up trying to get pregnant, at least not for the moment. But as I think I have said before we are not sure that going ahead with the adoption process immediately, or hoping that we can get through the approval without another miscarriage, or indeed without another pregnancy, would be such a good idea.
So we are thinking of something else. Respite foster care. Most foster carers have one partner at home full time or at least part time but respite care is mainly weekends/holidays and as an online friend put it, involves having children in your life but having time to be adults too. Some message board enquiries left me a bit confused as some people seemed to be suggesting that, like with adoption, the expectation was that you would both give up work and not be thinking of getting pregnant, but opinions differ, and I had a very positive phone call with our local authority this afternoon. They thought it was fine that we both work, and didn't seem put off by the fact that neither of us have children. They did want to know how big our house is, and what age we were thinking of. I said not teenagers just yet. But perhaps we should be "greedy" and ask for babies!
It seems to take about 3-6 months for approval - even erring on the long side, this is quicker than any estimates for adoption approval, and given our current progress it does sound practical to hope that we'd be able to do some foster care before either deciding finally to give up on getting pregnant and to adopt, or, realistically, before any viable pregnancy. We would need to be approved as adopters separately, it doesn't shorten the process, and it is rare in the UK for foster carers to adopt a child who has been in their care - we know it's not a shortcut. But it would be very good experience if we did want to adopt, and Mr. Spouse likes the idea of being able to give the children back when we are done.
The back bedroom is also now light green (as were my arms last weekend), and my computer has moved out of there; I'm working on moving my sewing stuff out, too. My Persona sticks didn't arrive before we went away on what turned out to be CD1 (about 5w after the ERPC) so I'm going to have another cycle of not really knowing what's happening, but I think I'm OK with that.
3 comments:
I think the foster care sounds like a great idea, though I would suggest you didn't go for babies - two reasons - (1)we heard a very harrowing story when we were doing our adoption course from experienced foster carers. Their first placement was a baby, just hours old, whom they kept for about 4 months until it everything had been sorted out for the adoption - and the wrench of giving up the baby was phenomenal, and the whole family was devastated (there were about 6 children already, all a bit older but still school age). I can't imagine what it might do to someone in your position to have to give up a baby you have bonded with. But (2), on a more practical level, I can't really see how you could care for a baby without giving up work? Unless you are talking about respite care for temporarily relieving the parents from caring for a severly disabled child? In which case I am sure that could be done weekends and evenings.
Best of luck with it anyway - I think you are doing amazingly well and being so positive.
This would definitely be weekends/holidays only, unless we decided to switch to adoption or go full time. I know it's going to be hard to give children/babies back but I hope that if it's only a weekend we'll already know it's time-limited.
That's who I talked to, littletadpole - but I'm being unnecessarily paranoid so I think I'll remove that comment if that's OK!
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