The money trail

We know that NLA has received our full application... because they've cashed our check/que! (it wasn't a very big one...)

We also got an email from the notary here to say he is ready to send the paperwork round the endless trail of government bodies that need to see it before it arrives in the US with OHP. After it arrives, I think we'll be legally clear to look for a family in OHP's state but not in NLA's, until they are sure our home study is as full as they'd like. We have been having a mini-Kafka moment with NLA and our UK social worker where NLA wanted our addresses for the last 10 years, the UK crowd had verified the last 5 years, NLA wouldn't take our word for the intervening 5, so we emailed the addresses to our UK SW who emailed them to NLA...

Anyone got a handy brick wall?

This week's favourite

Just lovely - from A Nickel's Worth of Common Sense.

Down the rabbit hole

I am unashamedly addicted to blogs, at least to reading (and also to procrastinating boring work jobs while writing - I should currently be making up some titles for some people who are giving talks at a one-day event, who haven't given me titles, and I should also be reformatting a variable list. ZZZZZZZ). I don't comment as much as I could, but I'm also slightly handicapped by still not having found a good blog feed reader that works on my phone (no, it is not an iPhone thank you).

I found when I was doing my last bit of journo stuff however that I read loads and loads of sciencey blogs (hooray!) but no regular blogs. So, if you were hoping for me to read your blog in the next couple of weeks - sorry. We just arrived in London and I'm doing another two weeks of pretending to be a journalist, starting on Tuesday.

I have however found a few new blogs recently. There are a lot of adoption blogs out there but a very large majority of them seem to be written by US married mothers who adopted domestic infants, many of them in semi-open adoptions. I've been looking around for some different ones, and have found:

LindyLoodles - UK, waiting for a match
Looking for Moonpiglet - UK, pre-approval
From Husband to Father - UK, pre-approval
The Johnsons - also UK, also pre-approval
(some or all of these are people who I found through Adoption UK)


A Nickel's Worth of Common Sense - Canada (I am pretty sure), open adoption from foster care/birth children/what is called "permanent guardianship" in the UK (I am in awe of this woman, she has six kids at home and still finds time to write!)
Think Bubbles - when I say this is a real life friend of mine, well, erm yes she is but we both met her through t'internet! Anyway she has two teenage sons adopted from foster care, sadly things did not turn out well for no 1 son.
Two Guys Adopting - another blogger I am in total awe of - these guys have a son adopted from foster care, and one of them writes extremely detailed posts about every single day with their son!

Lia, Not Juno - expecting a boy and talking about placing him - has recently moved to Wordpress - I am toying with the idea of doing the same*
Statistically Impossible - a birth father in an open adoption

Anyway I may or may not be "around", though I do have a meet lined up with another London blogger, unless she stands me up... no I'll understand really (sobs into hanky...)

*I did have a spell of weird comments a while back but went over to no-anon-posting and now it's mainly spam - but Blogger have sorted out their spam comments. So as I seem to be under the radar for people who want to sound off, I may just stick here for the moment.

In which we become slightly less poor

I have to fill in a US tax return - it doesn't do me any good or bad as I neither pay US taxes nor am entitled to a rebate, but it's a legal requirement, and they get snippy when I want to go back to the US, if I'm not up to date on them. Occasionally they have a Federal cash handout. I get these too, even if I haven't paid any taxes. This year, Mr Spouse got one as well, as he did his taxes last year!

The US government, unlike some others I might mention (*cough* the UK *cough*) actually encourages people to adopt - to the tune of $13K tax rebate.

They've just changed the rules so you don't actually have to pay the $13k before you claim it back. It's really to encourage people who wouldn't have paid that much in tax because they don't earn much - I'm not quite sure if our US taxes per year would reach that but over the five years you can spread it, if we did pay them, we'd easily pay that. But now we can claim it anyway!

I suspect there are 2 1/2 people to whom this applies, so it's not like we're going to bankrupt Obama. But it will be jolly nice to have a small amount back. Actually, it will be "back" since I paid them in the distant past.

Living space: choice, privilege, right?

This post was inspired by a post of A+A's, about living small. I like what they are doing, it is great to be in a neighbourhood where you can see a lot of people, and which is diverse. I feel lucky that we live about 2 streets away from our area's main Muslim community and that I can be part of a mixed women's group and that I know some of the members well enough to have a lengthy chat when I see them in the street and even to pop round and say hello. But we live in a large Victorian house that you can see in my previous post.

I'm lucky enough that I was able to buy somewhere when I lived in London and Mr Spouse had a house when he moved here as well. We joked that we had to look around a while before we found somewhere cheap enough. But actually it is fairly cheap to live here and on two salaries, we'd have been able to afford this place even without much of a deposit. We had to buy extra furniture (we didn't have a dining table or crockery storage, and we have an upstairs study/sitting area that needed a sofa) and we had the kitchen redone plus lots of cosmetic decoration.

I come from a privileged background, there is no denying it. My grandfather in the UK had a huge house - it had a spare flat that, if it wasn't rented out or lived in by the cleaner and her family, was a play space for us grandchildren (mind you, my grandfather had 5 children separated by 30 years). My grandparents in the US had a smaller one-storey building but set in gorgeous California land. We grew up in a Regency house on four floors. My parents had to put in heating, a floor in the basement, I suspect an inside toilet, but it was also somewhat spacious. We did learn to be frugal in what posessions we needed when we lived abroad for a couple of periods when I was a child but that was by choice and also a result of privelege - my dad was also an academic and was on sabbatical. My brother and I thought of these as an adventure and both I and my mother have always prided ourselves on packing light (yes, really!).

I love living in older houses, but before we moved here, the last time Mr Spouse lived in an older house was when he was 7 and their back-to-back (think East is East, bath in kitchen, no I am not joking) was condemned. They had had a bit of space there, and moving into their two-bedroom high rise he had to give away his train set. This was his pride and joy - he had his picture in a local paper with this train set. Small living was probably not high on his list of things that made him happy. I got to go back to my toys and my own bedroom after our years away.

They lived in the flats (think opening credits of Shameless, I think I have already said that!) until they got fed up of having the upstairs neighbours' baths overflow into their living room. Then they moved to the 26th floor in another block, but that was condemned (think famous flats in London that collapsed). They did move back to a two-up, two-down rented place but then Mr Spouse bought a one bedroom flat - the first person in his family to own property - and his parents were moved by their social housing landlord into a different one-bed as they didn't need the space.

So... do you aim to live small, do you feel this is a positive thing, or a luxury? Do you like living near, and knowing, your neighbours? How close is too close? Or are you happily indulgent and will take any space you can get, and would a mile away not be too far for your neighbours?

I think we are just about right where we are - I have always lived in a town and as a real inner city dweller Mr Spouse would not be happy anywhere isolated - one of his stipulations is being able to walk to at least a basic shop and to services so you don't have to drive to the doctor's when you are too sick to drive. But unless you are very lucky, even in those halcyon days (note tongue firmly in cheek) of Victorian terraces and all the kids playing in the street, neighbours can turn into noisy neighbours, irritating neighbours, and nuisance neighbours.

And you even get that in rambling middle class neighbourhoods - I'm reminded of the bad beginning piano playing of our neighbours when I was growing up. Still, my brother learned the trumpet. We got our own back!

Yes I know this is a bit lazy...

But life is like that. Anyway, this is a great post, and Martin, you'll be sorely missed (especially for the dreadful jokes).

Sorry but I have to share this...

This picture was taken by a professional photographer at the children's Christmas party run by the factory Mr Spouse's dad worked in, circa 1961. If you squint at my previous post, or if you are a FB friend, you'll be able to work out he's the kid with dark hair and his head in his hand. We think they are watching a magician. Note Vimto bottles. Very Hulton Picture Library, don't you think?

I'm not sure if this is lazy or what...

But I'd like to try and start doing a "someone else's post of the week". Kind of like Creme de la Creme, only smaller.
I've just read this post of Bernardeena's and it was so well written, I just had to share.

Colour me confused

We are in a bit of a go-between situation between Official Hague Person and Nice Little Agency. Here's crossing our fingers that Nice Little Agency decides it's not too complicated to get accredited should we ever want to adopt again.

Anyway, we've got lots and lots and lots of cheesy pictures, we've sent them off to both sets of people, and we are resisting both OHP and NLA's efforts to start all our profile/letter statements with "dear birth parents" as, erm, they aren't yet (in fact likely they haven't given birth yet as well as not having relinquished any children). Though I think OHP were right to tell us not to write "our" child as obviously he/she is not our child.

NLA have earned various gold stars for trying to avoid extra expenditure and being very flexible, they are very happy for documentation going to them to be sent with (and therefore notarised with and therefore not charged extra for) documentation going to OHP. I panicked for a bit today thinking we'd have to have (and therefore pay for) another social worker visit but they say a letter from our regular social worker will do nicely.

Anyway I just thought I'd regale you with exciting tales of paperwork, and show you page 1 of our profile. Excuse flab in my picture at the bottom, and sorry it's a bit blurry - converting from Publisher to PDF to JPG obviously loses something:

I thought it was quiet...

but it's not that quiet. I am still very confused by Google Analytics, which I moved to after I found I couldn't use statcounter any more (and I can't remember why that was). But Google Analytics says I had no visitors in July at all. Which, er, isn't true.

Anyone got any better hints and tips? It's not that it's broken entirely as it says my other blog had a couple of July visitors.

What I Did On My Holidays

An installment here.

Professionals

This is from the Open Adoption Roundtable #18.

We are obviously not in an open adoption yet but have had interactions with lots of social workers - all of whom are in principle very keen on openness. But fully open adoptions with birth/adoptive parent directed meetings between both sets of parents and children are rare in the UK. Because most adoptions are from foster care the most common forms of openness are either letter contact, supervised and often quite tense birth parent visits, or self-arranged and relaxed visits with siblings or extended family members.

I get the impression the social workers are a little surprised we are so on board about openness - in fact I think they have been, probably quite wisely, preparing us for less openness than we'd be comfortable with. Practically speaking, we're never going to have a weekly visit, drop-in-when-you-want, first day of school and every birthday type of relationship. But we'd be happy (other things being equal) with regular visits with us and birth parent(s) without any agency/social worker involvement.

Our social worker is, I think, assuming that we'd actually have more contact with extended family (e.g.organised maternal grandparents who might have been a possible choice for raising a child, where one issue with a birth parent might be a lack of a permanent home). Oddly, though I imagine this might be a possibility, I can also envisage an opposite scenario, for example a birth parent who has not told their own parents that they have a child, so that we might meet them without being allowed to meet grandparents. This would be hugely unusual in the UK - and I think more UK adopters would have direct contact with extended family - so it's going to take some explaining to our UK social workers if we end up in that type of situation.

OK, now I have your open adoption attention - I need a quick bit of advice. We're just working on our profile, and I have put:

"We think it is very important for our child to know their biological family.

Because Dr Spouse’s mom’s family are from the US, she visited her grandparents there every summer when she was a child. We hope we will be able to take our child back to the US often to get to know their biological family."

Sooo.... I asked around and was told (not by a professional) that perhaps we should hold off on mentioning our hopes for openness, in the profile, in case it was read by expectant parents who were less interested in openness than us.

Now, if we had a link with expectant parents who wanted ongoing letter contact and were open to talking about in-person contact - then I think we'd be OK with that. Because from other people, I know that even if we set up to have ongoing in-person contact we might end up back in a letter contact, discussing in-person contact, situation anyway if circumstances changed.

So, what are people's opinions? Better not to mention our hopes in our profile, and speak about them in person? Or mention the most we'd be able to cope with (we think) and risk putting someone off who would rather have less?

HELLO

Sorry for the silence, but I'm not getting many real comments anyway so I'm not sure if people are just reading and going "meh" or not reading.

I'm in the middle of my media placement and it is such fun but very time-consuming - more because I've got a few urgent day job things to keep on top of in the evenings than because it's really such hard work. I can't really do anything toooo hard for the radio people in case I mess it up! And we are in London, having a nice break from real life, and I've just been to a conference (with digital recorder and fancy mike in tow, and having done a few fancy interviews, well, I thought they were fancy).

Now many of my regular readers know of the good ways to make your period start. I know I shouldn't be complaining having had two ridiculously short cycles, but at the weekend it was over 5 weeks and it was getting a bit ridiculous. We had (mainly) been careful and I was (fairly) sure I had ovulated late but I was trying the usual things. Wearing white knickers, going on a really long journey, and I even thought I was in the final approach when I had a migraine (looking back, it's been about 1 every 3 cycles on the final day or so). But no. It was getting so long that even Mr Spouse was getting anxious.

For the first time ever it was him who suggested getting a test and me who didn't want to. But of course it worked perfectly. Test on Sat afternoon and period started before I went to bed that night.

And, you know, I'm so busy with work, adoption paperwork, doing our profile, that to be frank, I really, really didn't feel disappointed.

Sometimes I amaze myself.

Just lovely

We've had a week away in a part of Greece that I knew absolutely nothing about until Mr Spouse told me - his cousin lives there. It was too short but I know we'll be back.

I was an au pair about 20 years ago in Rhodes and although it is lovely there, it is a lot hotter than here and - even though I was with the family and not doing many touristy things - it was really touristy even then, lots of "resorts", and I'm sure it's a lot busier now. This week we've been on Thassos (no, I'd not heard of it either) and over to Kavala, on the mainland, which is where the cousin lives with his wife and (when he's not at university in the UK) their son.

Thassos is a charter destination and we decided it would be a lot easier to do it as a package - Mr Spouse came independently previously - but we've got the typical 7 nights hotel, bed and breakfast and foraging for gorgeous food in the evenings. It's the kind of destination which attracts couples like us (over 25 and no kids) though most of the tourists aren't British - there are quite a few Germans, who tend to drive here, and a lot of Romanians and Bulgarians - it's just over the border from Bulgaria and a couple of hundred km from Istanbul.

It's also really popular with Greek families (it's a lot cooler than most other places and has nice sandy beaches) so seems to be a lay-on-the-beach holiday for most. That's not really our thing and the island is 100km round and the highest point is as high as Snowdon, so you won't really be surprised we headed up into the hills a couple of times for short walks. There is a mad lady who goes round and spray paints route marks onto rocks and trees and has written a little book. We didn't make it all the way up to the top... though we had planned to go on a jeep tour, it absolutely poured with rain the night before so the tour was cancelled. Several of the tours available were cheesy beyond words but it is the kind of place that you can drift from cafe to cafe (I'm very fond of Greek coffee), sample the pastries, read by the pool, and generally chill out.

Probably because of my exposure to home-cooked Greek food, I adore it, and we don't get very much of it in the North of England (some Turkish, and the same in London, where there is some Greek food, but it's not quite the same, plus I know the Greek words for it rather than the Turkish). I had some peaches the other day that were, seriously, the most peachy peaches I have EVER tasted in my life - including peaches in SoCal and in the south of France and in Spain.

The city where Cousin Spouse lives is apparently the largest seaside city in Greece - as I say, completely off my radar and indeed everyone I have spoken to about the trip. It is ripe for the city-break picking, I'd say. Unfortunately the only direct UK (and other N. European country) flights are weekly charters - not ideal for weekends - but you can go via Athens or I think some other choices. Easyjet are missing a trick. You've got gorgeous ocean views, steep rambling historic streets (though some of the historic buildings are a little hidden), harbourside restaurants, a bit of light shopping (there's Max Mara, Zara, and a street market that Primark-lovers would drool over, which also has olives, herbs, flowers, and a load of gorgeous fruit and veg you couldn't really get in the suitcase); Thassos itself is famous for olives and honey.

It's not what you'd call unspoilt as it is a big city with its own life and sadly - state of the economy and that - lots of empty shops - but we haven't seen or done everything by any means. We didn't venture inland but hiring a car and pootling round a huge set of ancient sights should be on the agenda at some point (heard of Philipi? did you know Drama was a place?). It's very historic in itself - a Byzantine aqueduct, as well as Roman/Ottoman/I can't remember ruins - it has a couple of small museums but typically they were "under renovation" - but the new museum on Thassos was pretty fabulous, so we didn't feel hard done by to miss that.

Cousin Spouse and his wife are lovely - he is very good value, full of stories, she is quite quiet and I felt a bit bad that she was always getting things for us, though I do know this is fairly typically Greek and even when I was "staff" people would get things for me, "people" especially meaning "women". We took a couple of group photos to prove for the adoption profile that Mr Spouse does have some family and I can't help feeling a little relieved that Mr Spouse looks younger than Cousin Spouse, even though he's 5 years older. We've been working on our profile and browsing other people's profiles and thinking we might play down a little the "we-are-always-travelling" angle as it can come across that couples don't have time to have kids - but it should be nice to show that the cousins live in a gorgeous Mediterranean city.

Anyway last night tonight and we're going back to the best restaurant of the week (there's always one we say 'got to go back there') for the mixed meze.

Just a quickie

Still on holiday - we're trying to get free tickets for a Prom that go on "sale" today and I'm currently number 400-and-something in a queue - hope you all like the new look.

Greek food/mountains/sea/weather all very acceptable (though Greek weather isn't all sun and clear skies - who'd have thought it - certainly not me as I spent a summer as a mistreated au pair in Southern Greece and I'm currently in Northern Greece). In London next week, then away for a week, then back in London for a further two weeks, in case anyone fancies getting together for a blog meetup. What's a blog meet, a bleet?

Pieces of paper no 4

Oh yes - forgot about this - form from what is now the Department for Education to ask who is our notary (and I have lost the quote from Experienced But Distant Notary so we are having to go with Local Notary) and who is our agency overseas. That will be piece no 19.

Still working on the agency form but making photos a priority. Appointment to pretend our neighbour's cot is ours at 6pm.

I had something else... oh yes. In typical husband fashion, Mr Spouse now says that he has always said that he is fine with saying we'll hope to adopt a child who is either white or Hispanic* - which is not actually my memory of the conversation, but whatever.

*and I have recently discovered this is not actually an ethnic classification on the new US census but it is there on the agency form. So.

Spinning

The wheels, my head, something.

We're off on Saturday for a week's holiday and then I have the first part of my Being Slightly Famous placement, plus a conference. So I won't be back here for 5 weeks.

This creates lots of last-minute tasks, though it's a bit easier to plan to be away from the office for about 4 or 5 weeks than to suddenly find oneself landed on ones back with a broken shoulder and no way to pick up the pieces for 6 weeks (like last summer).

At the forefront of my mind is however a very important issue - what to pack. Last summer the weather was mainly rotten and I could only wear a very limited range of clothing - I remember some agonising changing room sessions trying to put on front-buttoning blouses. So I've, erm, splurged a bit this year (though the post office are getting very used to me sending back returns, too). But I can't fit it all in the one and a half cases I'm allowed! I'm reduced to standing in front of my wardrobe gazing longingly at brand new, over the head, dresses.

Too much information?

This is from Open Adoption Roundtable no 17 - which asks:

Are there any things that you don’t want the other members of your triad to know—or that you don’t want to know about them? I’ve heard first mothers talk about not sharing their birth stories with adoptive parents because those are for the adoptees and for themselves only. I've also heard of adoptees concealing their reunions from adoptive parents so as not to cause them pain. What don’t you want shared in your adoptive relationships?

We don't have our adoption yet but one of the things I've thought about a lot is how much to share with future children about our miscarriages. And if we have an open relationship with our child's biological parent(s) then this is something we'll need to share, or decide not to/how much to share with them. Plus we'll need to talk, I assume, with any expectant parents who are considering placing with us, about why we don't have biological children (and I've just read A+A's post).

Although I am very much for openness with children it's also not surprisingly something I find very upsetting to talk about. I think I'm more wary of making a child feel responsible for our happiness - in the sense of making us feel better when talking about something major and upsetting, rather than in the sense of having "made our lives complete". And I actively avoid talking about miscarriage with pregnant women - even though I often feel they are oblivious and complacent.

Though I did recently become Grumpy Old Woman when someone was ranting about how "everyone in the past used to X when pregnant, what's with all this crazy new medical advice". Yes, I said - and they lost babies. That's why the medical advice. I don't always try and spare people's feelings.

The other side to the story that isn't really mine to tell completely but which is very relevant, is some of the circumstances behind A and my fostering him. I can share that he came to us under very random and upsetting circumstances and that I had to find another placement for him and how difficult and sad that was for me. But I can't share all the things that have happened to him, or some of the things he may have done. And if I share exactly how he's done, recently, well it doesn't sound like a major success story - but compared to the alternative, it is.

Cheating

It is a beautiful day and we are thinking of photos, of our house and of us, for our "hello we are lovely people please think of placing your baby with us" letter, which I don't like calling a "dear birthparent" letter. Profile. That's the word.

We have decorated our back bedroom in a child-friendly style but we don't have any appropriate furniture - we are working on it being less of a dumping ground though we have loads of toys. One of my colleagues lives on our street and has two under-4s so, since I have to tell her some time that we're adopting, I thought I'd ask her for the rather unusual favour of borrowing a cot.

We spent quite a while discussing the whole adoption process - she knew a bit from our mutual colleagues S & M who are the ones who adopted from Central America - I didn't go into the horrible history of our miscarriages, and she did make the usual "now you'll get pregnant" joke though she wasn't offended when I said "it's not funny when you've heard it 50 times!".

Their cot is not really very portable - but she had a bright idea - we're going to bring some props and photograph it in situ. Happily the lower part of their nursery walls are the same as our back bedroom so I feel a little Photoshopping coming on...

US 1, England 1

Well, something like that. You've got to make it topical, haven't you?

We had a long phone call with a lawyer tonight - quite productive and reassuring - though of course now we have more homework.

I'm in the middle of cutting out some red-eye from some pictures of us with the nieces, and then going to have an initial look at the form for the lawyer. We'd like to work with another agency as well though they recommend doing some networking ourselves. I am not quite so sure about that but I suppose it gives me something to do. I have a large number of contacts in the US of course (just looking down my Facebook list) and some of them are just the kind of people to hand out letters for us.

I've put Mr Spouse on to finding us a notary and picking more photos...

I am relieved to hear that: we don't have to do more than one application form (they will forward all our information to the other agency); we don't have to do a new home study (updating the home study seems to just involve a letter from our agency here saying nothing has changed/we've got a new cat/Mr Spouse has finished his course); we probably have to find one new referee but already have a candidate; we probably have all our other paperwork in order.

Later - I've got to page 12 out of 23 and am flagging...