Welcome to our Blog!

Hello Family and Friends,

Welcome to our blog. We are going to use this space to blog our journey to parenthood. Most of you know Dave and I have decided to persue adoption through the Children's Aid Society. This was something that I have always felt we were meant to do with our life, but we always thought we would wait until we had biological children before going down this path. This past summer we decided it was time to start adding to the Dixon clan and were beginning to try the biological route. After a few months of no success we began to seek God for his for our family and adoption kept coming into our hearts. It was never our plan to do this first as we were always told adoption workers preferred people to have biological children before they adopt. After 3 months of trying to conceive we decided to go to an adoption information session at the Ottawa CAS and we decided to put in our application. We were told once the application is put in it could take up to a year before the homestudy is started. We decided that we could try both routes to parenthood for the time being and would just see what would come first. We put in our application in September and 3 weeks later we were approved to start the homestudy! It was amazing to see how quickly we were approved, especially after our adoption worker told us others that were approved at the same time as us had waited 9 months to a year.

In the past 3 months we have completed PRIDE and our homestudy. PRIDE is a mandatory course that all individuals wishing to adopt in Canada must complete. This consisted of 30 hours of in class training with other families either wishing to adopt or do foster care. This training is designed to show families the reality of what children in care have gone through so that we don't enter adoption with rose coloured glasses. We learn alot about loss and attachment in order to prepare families for the transition.

Our homestudy consisted of 4 meetings with our adoption worker and this took place over a few months. The first meeting was at the CAS office and the other 3 took place at our home. As a part of the homestudy we had to get medical and police checks as well as reference checks from family and friends. In the meetings we discussed our family history, how we were raised, our marriage and any issues in our lives that we may have had to overcome. During our last meeting our worker shared with us that she felt we were a really strong couple and that we would be best suited for children that have faced abuse/neglect, she also shared that she did not think our wait would be too long. Over the past 8 months at the Ottawa CAS they have placed 80 children into adoptive homes and in a typical year they place 60, so it is a busy year for them. We also confirmed with her after taking PRIDE and doing the homestudy that we still wanted 1 child or 2 siblings up to 5 years old.

So now we are playing the waiting game and trying our best to prepare to be parents. We realize that we may not have the first few years of a childs life to figure out how to raise them, so once they arrive we need to have a game plan. So Dave and I are reading a lot of books and putting our plan on paper....I will continue in the blog to share more about our journey to parenthood!