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hi everyone welcome back to my channel my name's molly i'm a mum here in the uk two children my husband and i have a biological four-year-old daughter and lastly we brought home our beautiful little boy through the uk adoption process today's video i'm doing a q a because i put a question upon instagram to see if anybody had anything they wanted to ask and i was inundated with questions so i've picked ten i've tried to pick some of the more common ones but it might be that i have to do a video later on covering some of the other ones first question when are you going to tell your son he is adopted so a really good question i feel that generally there's a really big myth that adopted children shouldn't know they're adopted and a lot of tvs show this where children find out they're adopted and it's a big breakdown in real life that is probably what would happen it would probably cause a bit of an identity crisis for a little one so our son we're already telling him that he's adopted although he's pre-verbal it's in conversation every day our four-year-old always speaks about foster carers and tummy mummies which is birth family about how we adopted him she tells her friends so it's very much an open conversation in the home anyway and we really want to keep it open so that he's really confident in who he is where he's come from his identity we want him to be able to as best as possible navigate his adoptive identity with his birth identity almost to make it whole so that he can be confident in all those pieces of his jigsaw fitting together knowing as much as possible so that he can kind of process everything he has been through so that is our hope if you do have adoption training and you're going through the adoption process you will also receive a lot of training on identity and the importance of letting a little one know that they are adopted as soon as they are able to kind of understand that did you have concerns about loving your biological child more than your adopted child yes and this is such a common and normal concern i get a lot of messages about this from people who are adopting with biological children and it's definitely something that you know cross through mind on my husband's mind for me personally i always felt that i had the capacity to love a child that was not biologically mine my husband was very skeptical very nervous it was something that we talked about with our social worker a lot we i think we even spoke about it in panel as well um but we were very realistic in our expectations we we had a mindset that we weren't going to meet our little boy and instantly fall in love we were very realistic and kind of set the expectation that we will meet him we'll bring him home and that attachment that love and that relationship will grow and that's exactly what it did you know i will say that in the beginning i had very different loves for my biological daughter and my son i definitely love them both but in very different ways but you know over half a year later after placement i can honestly say that there is no difference in my levels of love anyway there's no difference in how much i love them both i honestly forget that my little man's adopted half the time because i just he just absolutely melts our hearts what did your support network look like going through the adoption process so support network is huge um in the adoption process because obviously social workers want to know who's going to support you when you have a bad day or challenging times or child care for example so me and my husband were very lucky we live where we've always grown up and been raised so we have a lot of family locally we have good friends locally we're very active within our community we have good relationships with schools and nurseries churches local businesses medical staff and our employers for example so we our support network was pretty vast however that doesn't i don't want to panic anyone you can always build a support network through zoom or facetime and it could even be people like your neighbors our neighbours are part of our support network especially in emergencies but pre-adoption we didn't have any adoption-related support networks so when we were going through the adoption process we really tried to build that so we joined our adoption uk community group and met a lot of foster carers and adopted us through that we found people who had adopted or were adopting locally so we started to meet with them and ask their advice and build a relationship with them we met lots of people in our prospective adopter training and keep in touch with them and obviously our agency and our little man's local authority are also a really good arm of support so that is what our support network germany looks like it was quite big but don't let that worry support networks come in all different shapes and sizes if you could go back in time to stage one and tell yourself something what would it be i would tell myself to take a chill pill because in stage one i was a wreck i was a panicker i was just so eager to go but so anxious and wanting to get everything done i would tell myself to relax but equally i would tell myself to focus on independent learning so stage one is hard because there's a lot of waiting you're waiting for a lot of checks to come back there's not really much that you as a prospective adopter can do and it's definitely not as intense as stage two so i would just tell myself to focus on researching learning as much as possible and building my learning log not only to prepare me for stage two but also so that i have a really nice learning log to take to panel i definitely did focus on a learning log but i feel like i could have plowed a lot more of my time into it instead of worrying how did you know you were ready to adopt so i like this question i have covered a little bit of this in my um adopting after baby loss video which i'll link down below if you're interested so i knew for many reasons i had in a nutshell a horrifically awful traumatic pregnancy in birth with my daughter and i had suffered baby loss around that as well so the thought of hospitals and needles or even the thought of being pregnant made me feel a bit sick i'd always kind of had in my head i'd have one child i was done with children and then my big girl asked for a sibling and the mum guilt took over i thought gosh okay let's think about this properly how can we do this in the best kind of emotionally supportive way for all three of us and i knew we were ready to adopt as soon as i started researching it because i was so excited i generally had those butterflies of excitement you get when you're anticipating something really positive i knew the moment i knew i was ready was when we'd attended our adoption information evening with our agency i came out feeling on cloud nine that that pressure of having to have a biological child on me and my mind and my body just went out the window and i felt like a weight had been lifted on my shoulders and because of that and my husband's seeing that in me as well um we just knew it was right we knew we were ready and it was in our gut and we trusted our gut instinct and we were so right so i do just want to say that a lot of people always don't know if they're ready and i certainly have a lot of friends within the uk adoption community who have adopted who didn't know they were ready they just kind of went to a lot of information evenings did a lot of research and gradually built into the process themselves and that's fine as well there might not be a time when you personally are ready is different for everybody what are your thoughts on changing your little man's name after adoption so again this is a topic that comes up generally in society society as well a lot of people ask us what you're going to change his name to did you name him that or did he did he come with that name and after all of the adoption training that we had we knew that we did not want to change his name he knew that he knew his name he was responding to his name even though he was very very small and young was a huge part of his identity and for our aim in him being confident in who he is in his identity we were very adamant that we would not change his name it is very much encouraged and advised not to change and adopt a child's name for identity reasons now some people can be advised to change your name if it does make that child identifiable so if a child has a birth name that is incredibly identifiable within your local area then it may be that a social worker agrees it is the safest option to change that child's name i certainly know a lot of cases where that has happened but it generally is encouraged not to do it and i could do a whole other video on that but and for us we definitely did not have any intentions on changing our little man's name you can always add middle names that's what we've decided to do we've kept his birth name but we've added a name of our own and i think his name in total is just incredibly special you tell your son that he's adopted but do you tell other people that he is adopted so yes in our house adoption is celebrated we embrace it we don't go around shouting it locally from the rooftops but it does come up into conversation you know for example if i'm having a conversation with someone and they ask me about how my labor was with him i will say actually well he we adopted him and then they ask a million questions and i try and stay positive and it's a great conversation we want him to know that we celebrate that that we love him just to see it and that we love we love how we came to be a part of our family we are so proud that adoption is a part of our lives and that you know we've extended our family through adoption we are just on cloud nine with it we've had the best experience so far and so if people do ask or ask any questions then yes we are happy to answer them hopefully educate some people more about the positives of adoption and beat some of those negative myths and stigmas as well we try not to go around like plastering the fact that he's adopted because when he's older we don't want him to kind of like label himself as the adopted child and we just want him to feel accepted and loved and included but where appropriate we definitely we definitely do tell people he's adopted like i said we want him to be proud of that as well and not not just us are you going back to work after adoption leave how do you feel about your little man doing nursery so the plan so far is yes i will be going back to work i will have had about 10 11 months off on adoption leave in total um i am planning on going back full time because that's what i've always done with my daughter but i am very flexible in that because i know that our little man may not settle that well into child care so the plan is for him to go to nursery my daughter did nursery full-time from nine months but my daughter doesn't have any attachment issues so this was actually asked at panel they asked us you've got plans for full-time nursery what if he doesn't settle and so we've always been of the mindset that one of us may need to go part-time we might need to be flexible with our hours we might have to kind of get support networking to maybe have him a day a week or one of us might just not have to work it's completely out in the open at the minute i would hope that he settles well and we have started a very very long settling and process to nursery so i don't go back to work until like spring summer time and so we're starting visits now weekly so he'll have had so many visits but we've done that in the hope that he will build up the comfort levels slowly he'll get the idea that i come back for him that daddy comes back and picks him up and his big sister's there as well outside of preschool so that's certainly a big help but he's starting to make little friends he seems comfortable around the staff but i think a visit of an hour is a lot different to 40 hours a week so we'll see we'll see it's very flexible and we will totally be childled on this how did you whittle down the children's profiles you were looking for and how prescriptive were you so a matching criteria question we were really confident with our matching criteria we certainly said no to a lot of things and that's absolutely fine so our social worker gave us a big form with age gender and a list of additional needs that we were or were not comfortable with we just ticked yes or no and i will be honest we took no to a lot and the main reason for doing that was because we wanted to be able to parent both of our children with an equal split we didn't want to adopt a child that required 80 of our time where we were only giving 20 of our time to our biological daughter we didn't think that would be fair as parents so we were pretty prescriptive and there should be no judgment there you have to be really confident in the needs that you are going to be dealing with because the last thing anybody wants is a placement breakdown and that adoption breaking down that's it's really the last option anybody wants so we were pretty prescriptive and in terms of whittling down children's profiles once we had our matching criteria and we knew what kind of child we were looking for we would input that into linkmaker which if you don't know what that is check out my family finding video or our social worker would also kind of know the matching criteria of potential children when she was looking at profiles from other social workers so we only ended up having two profiles one on link maker one that our social worker sent us and the one that our social worker sentence was our little boy last one did you constantly worry that you weren't going to be approved as adopters at panel yes oh this was a huge fear for me for six months i was terrified i did everything in my power to do every single thing right and there as much research and as much learning as possible i tried to be teacher's pet in training i did everything um but i think it's generally a fear you want something so much that you just believe that something is bound to go wrong and for us the process was going so well and we were loving it so much that for us we only knew bad negative things happening in terms of having children and so we were constantly worrying but our social worker reassured us i constantly had chats with her i would email her if i was struggling she would give me a phone and she would reassure us and i do just want to say a social worker would not take you to panel if they were not confident that you were going to get approved you would not get that far if they didn't think that you were suitable to adopt because it's a waste of an agency's time and it's a waste of your time so you will have a very good idea if you're going to be approved and honestly looking back at panel it was one of the best experiences ever i don't know what i was worried about but it's just one of those things i hope that video has been helpful for some of you i hope it's giving you some insight and some reassurance in some areas and if you do have any more questions that you want me to cover in the future uh you can find me on instagram at molly mama adopt or just comment down below and i will make a note of it for next time please also subscribe to my channel for more adoption related content i will try and film some more videos but having two kids at home in a national lockdown is not easy so i'll try and make the most of my time while i can but i can't promise anything thank you for watching guys bye