Adoption workshop

This past weekend hubby and I went to a 3 day adoption workshop run by pretty much the only non state agency in Alaska (ok, there is one little one up in Fairbanks as well, but for our purposes... ya know..) Catholic Social Services has been doing adoptions in Alaska for over 40 years, so they have a pretty good track record, and even though we're not Catholic, they don't seem to mind. We had previously considered LDS Family Services, but turns out that they tend to farm out most of the paperwork and home studies and such to CSS, so we've decided we might as well just work with them.
It looks like a very good program, they offer lots of counseling for birth families and provide lots of follow up for all sides afterwards. They strongly promote open adoptions, though the level of openness varies and is something that everyone decides and agrees to up front.
It was a great way for Tom to get all caught up and up to speed on things. I've been doing the research on this for years, but he's had other things (like last year's deployment) to keep his mind otherwise occupied, and there were a lot of things he hadn't thought of or didn't know about.
It was a great experience and the next step for us is to set up an appointment to go in and talk to them and get all the paperwork started. That will be waiting a few weeks though as Tom heads back to work on the North Slope tomorrow. Sadly this weekend also saw us both completely mobbed by a nasty virus that had been going around so we took the last few days to recover this week. But we are once again fit and sane and not all doped up on cold meds :) *lol*