1st Post Placement Report

For those not familiar with international adoption most countries require the adopting families to provide periodic updates on how the child is doing after the adoption. For some strange reason some people get upset that they have to do this. Personally, we're more than happy to show anyone and everyone how well Andrei is doing.

I mentioned in my blog the Russian government also uses these post-placement reports to discipline adoption agencies. If agencies are late or missing these reports, the Russians can (and do) pull the agency's accreditation. If you're unlucky enough to be with an agency and this happen, you're stuck (sometimes having starting all over at added expense with another agency).

This is yet another reason we've taken the approach of doing absolutely everything by the book for our post-placement report. Reminding everyone involved (our home-study agency mainly) of the new specific rules and requirements Russia has. I'm sure they think we're nuts since they do them all the time, but we wanted to make sure our report was done exactly as the Russians want it done. Also our placement agency was totally honest and up front with us and did everything you could expect them to under some pretty tough circumstances. No person or company is perfect, but we were happy with they way they treated us. During the accreditation mess last year, they were one of the first seven to regain accreditation. It's my belief that they did so because of their extremely ethical practices and their adherence to Russian law. And we wanted to help them keep that reputation intact.

So our case worker (the same woman who did our home-study report) came to visit us and see how Andrei is doing. Because we live in California and our placement agency is in Minnesota we use a different agency here in CA to do our home-study. They are also responsible for creating the post-placement reports forwarding them our placement agency (who then submits them to the Russian government).

Andrei was his usual happy self during the visit. He kept running back and forth between Stef and myself playing away while our social worker asked a bunch of questions. She asked just normal stuff: How have you been discipling Andrei?, Has he met the rest of the family?, What activities does he do?, How is this language skills developing?, etc. etc. etc.

Andrei is a bit shy with new people so he stayed pretty close to us which was fine because we think it also showed how well he's bonded with us. That was shown perfectly at the end of the visit. We asked him to give a hug to Natalie (our social worker) and he did but only for about 3 seconds before he reached back away from her wanting to have Mommy hold him. Keep in mind the bonding is still going on but it feels good to know we're his parents and that he views us as special (well, us and Elmo, but at least we're in there somewhere).