New Agency

We met with our new social worker this past Friday, Erin Ginn from UCan. Tell everyone you know thinking about adoption to call her - we loved her right away. When our other case worker came it always felt like I was talking to my boss or the cops. Erin was really friendly and really easy to talk to (I'm sure I liked her because she laughed at all my jokes). In our opinion LCFS was pushing interstate adoption on us, and when we sat with Erin she said in state, out of state, on Mars, she'd help us get there - whatever we wanted.

Interestingly, a woman on my TNT team said she had a similar encounter with LCFS when she called them to ask about adoption, and because of that chose not to continue with them. Lutherans! They're probably Swedish too!

She took a some info and we signed more papers, and she will put in a request to get our home study documentations so we dont have to go through all of that again. Our home study should be done by now - a couple weeks ago our LCFS caseworker told us she was just waiting for her supervisor to sign off on it. I asked Erin if it was like Allstate and she would break up with our other agency for us, and she said we didn't have to tell them anything if we didnt want to. They should get the hint when the request for the homestudy comes. But I sent her an email anyway, and she is on vacation for two weeks. I'm sure its deserved - but she could have let us know if our homestudy was completed! It made me really feel like switching to UCan was the right thing to do.

Also, they have kids if we are ready. Jerry's face was priceless when she said they have kids that may need a home, they are 2, 3 and 4. I thought he was going to pass out. We politely declined. But it was such a difference - LCFS told us just to go online and find kids and report back, and try to narrow the search because they didnt want to have to be sending our home study over and over and over a million times. Not only is UCan pretty much saying they have IL kids, but they dont care if they have to send out 20 home studies, if thats what we want they will do it. Another thing, we paid close to $2000 for all of the licensing and homestudy, which we knew was free if we went right to DCFS. We opted to pay to have someone do it rather than risk doing it wrong. Apparently UCan does not charge. Erin was very surprised to hear we had paid so much. Sometimes I wonder why I was so quick to settle on LCFS, but I really didn't know where else to go.

At work, when I talk to potential landlords they tell me all the time, "i didnt know anything about the billboard business." So I have to assure them that no one does, only a select handful of weirdos such as myself. And so if they made a bad deal in the past, or could have gotten more money, they shouldn't feel bad or regretful. I find myself in a similar situation, because who knows anything about adopting from DCFS? Plenty of people told me they had adopted once they found out we were, but not from DCFS. So I just have to be happy that eventually we did find Erin (she was recommended to us by a couple we met at our PRIDE training).

So, really we are ready to look and be considered. The home study should be handed over without incident, it just might take some time. In the interim, we can still be considered and we can still search and if we find children that we think would be a good fit, we can apply. So everything seems to be going along well and we should have a match soon. Unless by some miracle Jerry actually does become pregnant...