This is so real

Today was our Initial Assessment Interview at our homestudy agency - it was a 2 hour information fest. Mostly us sharing information with the agency representative, easy stuff like how we met, about our families, and our decision to adopt. There were some harder ones too, like why we are still together and please explain how you feel about inter-racial adoption. Sounds easy, but it's hard to articulate some of those thoughts and emotions. I don't really feel anything about inter-racial adoption because it's not an issue. And why are Sam and I still together... I mean what do you say "Well, you see, I loved him from the time I was 18 years old and it's hard to walk away from someone who stuck a needle in your butt everynight for a year!" Ummm, we're together because we're better together than we ever would be apart - because we love each other - we are best friends - and because it's meant to be that way. But I didn't say most of that. I just said we love each other and are best friends (although personally I think the part about the needles would have added flair).

I thought we were naive about welcoming an Asian child into our lives and raising him/her as our own, but it turns out that our lack of thoughts is actually more prepared than most. I guess it's not really a lack of thought because I think a lot about what's going to happen and how people will stare and what teachers will think at our first conferences and how in a crowd a stranger could never pick out the Listopad siblings based on their features, but it doesn't matter to us. I guess a lot of people are even so blinded that they are unaware of what's to come because they don't care about the race issue. But the representative seemed impressed we had discussed such issues and were preparing ourselves for those future situations.

We received a mound of paperwork that needs to be completed before we are assigned a social worker and can set up out in-home interview. This is where we really control so much of how quickly this initial process is going to take. It's a lot of running around, getting doctors' letters and test results, finger prints, photocopying documents, and signing papers. I think if we really concentrate and do a lot of running around we can have everything in about 2 weeks. This also includes a bunch of papers we need for our Dossier. Then we can set a date for our major interview and really get things underway.

The Dossier is much more than I had anticipated - it's a long list of documents the Thai government needs to review us - everything they are going to base their decision on about what child, if any, we are able to adopt. It all seems so random, a bunch of Thai officials sitting around reading letters from doctors and looking at pictures of our living room and then choosing a child from the orphanage for us to parent. But there's a magic in there, a destiny in the entire process that has worked again and again all over the world. It's really quite amazing when you think about it. How could it be random? I mean really deep down, can it really just be random?

Any - long update, but there is all is. I'll try to keep updates on the paperwork and the running around. I'm sure getting fingerprinted and asking for background checks on ourselves will be an interesting experience :)