Personal Update: Sticking to it for now

The senior caseworker is handling our case now. We had a meeting with her today. I think we're going to stay with our agency until the end of the year. If we still feel no progress is being made, we'll leave.

I found out the extent of the damage caused by the sluggishness of our old worker. We had been given our homestudy to read over five months ago. I made numerous corrections. Those corrections were simply never made and the erroneous version kept being submitted. Here are a few of the errors listed roughly in decreasing importance. I thought these all had been corrected 5 months ago.

Was	Should Be
0-6	0-7
"minor emotional needs"	"mild to moderate"
that my husband and I had been dating for 5 years before getting married last year	living together for 5 years
adoptive placement only, no legal risk	some legal risk OK
MPA	MBA

The caseworker has promised to update it immediately and add an addendum. The addendum will say 0-10. She said they are really going to get cracking on our case. I have a measured degree of confidence in her.

She didn't actually apologize to us on behalf of the agency, which I think should have been done. However, she did say something that made me feel better: "I know this is my job, but it's your life."

We've also been advised to attend an adoption fair in order to make ourselves visible to the caseworkers who also attend the fair. So far, we've been skipping them. Everybody hates adoption fairs. I'm not too happy about the idea, but she has a point.

My feelings right now are rather complicated. I want to take a break, but things might be heating up. Blah...

In order to make myself feel better this week I spent some time looking into a physical goal. This is tough because I'm not very physical. Every time I think about getting back into doing karate or aikido, which I used to do as a kid, I remind myself it actually involves exercising, which I hate.

Between the ages of 15-50, my father was probably in better shape than all the hosts on the Discovery Channel put together. Although for mysterious reasons he has something against running, he hiked, cross-country skied, swam, dived, rock-climbed, bicycled, and has ridden a motorcycle across the Sahara desert. In his mid-sixties he's still in excellent shape although his ankle fusion slows him down, and he's scratched a few of the activities off the list. Anyway, I have inherited none of it except swimming. I love swimming and I'm a natural open-water swimmer. My form isn't great and I'm not fast, but I can stay in the water for hours and swim miles if I'm in any kind of decent shape.

I'm too chicken to do major open-water swimming on my own, but I found the perfect adventure vacation at www.swimtrek.com:

SwimTrek is the world's only swimming holiday operator, running swimming tours to Croatia, Greece, Malta, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and the British Isles. We go island or lake hopping following routes of cultural, historical and geographical significance.

I can easily handle their 5km a day average with a bit of preparation. The price of a tour includes being accompanied by a boat and put up every night.

I made my husband take some basic swimming lessons, because the first time we swam together I was quite frankly terrified he would drown. Let's just say he would not be up for this kind of tour. My mother gets too seasick. In the past, my father would swim too fast for me, but the ankle fusion would slow him down enough... I was optimistic, but he responded to my email about a swim trek by proclaiming "I'm an animal with solitary behavior".

Maybe a couple friends will be interested, but if they're not, I might go by myself for a week next summer. It's a nice long-term goal to keep in mind.