One of the first decisions I made was to seek to adopt a special needs child. I am active in a deaf church, have signed since I was a teen-ager. Not great, but I do okay and get my point across, and my vocabulary is constantly growing (and being corrected!) thanks to my deaf friends. Although it will mean a lot more learning and accommodations, it is a special need that I feel semi-equipped to be able to deal with.
I also wanted to adopt an older child. Since I do work and attend school, an older child who has some amount of independence would be a better fit for our family, and my Rick was also more interested in an older child than a young preschooler or toddler. (Rick, by the way, is very supportive of this idea, even understanding that it'll mean sharing mom's time, energies, and resources. He has always wanted a younger brother.)
I had been lurking on a listserv all summer for people who want to adopt Deaf/HOH children, and had already learned a lot from the folks there who are incredibly generous in sharing their knowledge. One of the postings mentioned some children waiting for adoption through an agency called WACAP and listed bare-bones details about some of them. One in particular caught my attention: A child named Sergey from Eastern Europe (Russia), 11 years old, deaf.
I contacted the WACAP rep to ask if they could share any further information on him, and they mailed me a brochure with pictures and write-ups on all of the Deaf/HOH children they were currently advocating for. Sergey was in there, and I just fell in love with his smile. The write-up mentioned that he was a slightly mischievous child who loved to make people laugh. I liked the sound of that--a child who still had a spirit and sense of humor despite a difficult start in life. I asked WACAP what the next step was.
That's when I found out that I was doing things backwards. Normally when one wants to adopt, one finds a licensed agency to do the homestudy, and once the homestudy is done, THEN the matching of parent to child is done. Me? No--I gotta do it bass-ackwards by finding the child first and then having to go out and get the homestudy.
So that's where we are now: WACAP sent me a list of agencies in my area that I might want to consider for the home study process (they can't do it themselves since they are based in Washington State). So I need to slog through all this and decide what agency to use.
No comments:
Post a Comment