Adoption Update

Today was our appointment with the Swiss social worker to get an introduction to the Swiss adoption process. One of my co-workers went with us to translate as the social work didn't think she knew enough English to communicate everything.

I need to send her an email summary to validate what I think I heard, but I think there weren't too many surprises. Before we can do anything we need to get evaluated by the Swiss social system. This requires at least one home visit and 4 or 5 office meetings. The bad news is that there is an eight month wait to get evaluated.

I believe we can simplify the process by adopting via the US system (still requires a Swiss social evaluation), but we'll see what happens. Things are a bit more complicated because the US didn't sign an international treaty that the rest of the world that signed that is supposed to help protect the rights of the children. More info on the treaty can be found here.

We also can't adopt two children at once and the child has to be at least 18 months younger than Niamh.

We used a babysitter, Delphine, whose name we got from the Red Cross. We had met her before and I think things went well. The kids were both asleep (per schedule) when we got home, so that was good. Even better, she said she'd come back.