Risk

Yesterday we saw Chris our CW again. We did a little more paper shuffling (we handed him a PILE of financial copies, he had us sign more stuff). He did a home walk through, really didn't suggest we need to do much safety stuff, we already had smoke/co detectors installed, already bought a fire ext and a fire escape ladder. So I need to do cab locks on the under sink cabs in the kitch and in the half bath, and put outlet plugs in our downstairs rooms (fam room, kitch lower outlets, dr & lr) but other than that we seam cool safety wise. Oh but we do have to work on our fire escape plan thing that we have to post in our kitch.  The meeting also included a lot of talking. We talked about my parents, his parents, my sibs, his sibs and how we all relate and such. How we all communicate. We also talked about our pets and how they act around people...great i thought... Our big cat loves people-just not necessarily my mom, sister, bil or niece nephew... he hisses at them. We had to tell the truth. The guy asks, but he doesn't act out to them, like biting our scratching, right? Thank goodness he doesn't...  We also started to talk about us having to think about and eventually nail down what kind of child we wanted. That led into him further explaining their "pool of names" and their process. (We are lucky i guess cuz he is able to answer more q's than most cw I guess you would say. Apperantly he doesn't do intakes normally, but because the department is loosing people and will soon be undergoing reorganization, he has to do some intake families.  So ok back to risk. That is kinda what I am bloggin about today.  So we started to talk about what we are open to. I explained age wise that we are open to under three but that the guy presenting at the info session made it seam like you were forced to say 3+ if you wanted to adopt. So we said our range is 0-6 (orig was 3-6) and then we talked a little about what race we were interested in. I am ok with any race, hubby is not. So he is really going to have to nail down what he absolutely is not open to.  I kinda know he is against African american just because he doesn't want the "stigma" of first impression being that the child is adopted. He is also concerned that we wouldn't be able to provide the cultural aspects of that spacific race. I agree with him on that, but at the same time disagree. How are we able to provide cultural support to an asain or mexican child but not an african american. So we need to sit down and discuss that. And then we all talked about risk and how much legal risk we thought we might be interested in. Then he went into describing the process after placement, there is apparently a juryed court hearing to see if it is substantiated, if yes, it goes in front of judge. If he finds that tpr should happen, the parents have a chance to (i cant think of the word) but they can dispute it. That trail can take months apparently. That scared me, well that and the fact that our CW said most parents dispute it. Great... so not only do we run the risk of having to hand the child back because the parent is doing what the judge says they need to do, but we could also loose them if they win the court dispute thing. So that appearantly is considered medium risk. So we have to decide how much risk we are interested in. But we keep trucking along at a somewhat fast pace-yeah! After all the waiting on the state I am glad it is moving along. We have signed up for mandatory classes, so buy the next time we will have taken 6 of the 9 required pre-license classes. Ok, well I am off, yeah!