DSS orientation meeting

Amazingly enough, something has happened in our adoption journey! It's not really new in essence, but it's motion, the one step back in preparation for the two forward. 

We got a return call two weeks ago from SC DSS, received paperwork via email, filled it out, got Bethany records transferred, and this evening attended the informational orientation meeting. 

This meeting, while required for everyone entering the DSS program, was an introduction to 'how to adopt', and we got copies of all the paperwork - a binder-full - that we've already done, but with different headers on it, so we have to copy (re-copy in some cases) everything over. Not entirely unexpected, but still very frustrating. We did learn some DSS specific things that we need to know, and we met our social worker, who seems very nice.  So that's all good. 

What did surprise us, (me especially, being that I'd spoken on the phone to the person doing the meeting) was that this was strictly a meeting on adoption, and not fostering.  We had intended to enter the foster care program and be hopefully adopting a child we foster.  But what happens, apparently, is that once our adoption homestudy approval process is complete, they'll share all the records with the foster worker in our county, she'll require one or two more things for the foster care side of it, and then we'll be set to go.  But they'll be done separately. 

Despite our previous 14 hours of training, we will probably have to go to the DSS training. Ours were topics picked at random in an online setting, and so we didn't happen to learn a lot about some of the things that DSS covers.  It sounds like this one is done in a sort of high-impact cramming weekend, though I'm not precisely sure what the time committment will be.

We will be finding out more as we go.  We continue to appreciate all your prayers and support through this ever lengthening process.