OPAN

It helps if you have a good lawyer to get you through the legal stages of the Adoption or Home For Life processes.

If you have used a great lawyer or solicitor for your Adoption or Home For Life legal requirements over the last few years – and you would like to recommend them to other OPAN visitors/members, please let us know their details in this forum topic.

Important: Recommendations only please – no horror stories (seriously – we don’t want to get on the wrong side of anyone who knows how take legal action!)

We’re running a $5 OPAN Library Special.

Check out our huge selection of adoption and parenting books in the OPAN Library and borrow a book for just $5!  (or 2 books for $8, 3 books for $9).

As adoption applicants in the local pool in Auckland, the adoption numbers (ie: how many adoptions so far this year, and how many applicants in the pool) are important to us. These numbers give us a feel for our “odds”. Unfortunately the figures aren’t getting any better (as mentioned in the recent NZ Herald article link on an earlier post).

Recently OPAN contacted CYF with a request for some detailed historical statistics for NZ/Auckland Adoptions for the last 5 years (number of adoptions vs avg number of applicants in the pool).  Unfortunately they weren’t able to provide stats for the rest of the country at this stage – but we’ll continue to ask.

Thanks to Lynley at CYF for the above information.

Update: It looks like similar statistics for local adoption in Australia: 61 Local Placement Adoptions in 2009/10.

The Adoptive Families website is another great adoption resource with a wealth of information.  They recently had an interesting article about dealing with a family member or close friend making a rude/awkward remark: All in the Family.  Have a read and see how much sounds familiar?

We’d love to hear about any comments that you’ve had from family, friends or strangers, and how you’ve dealt with them?  Feel free to tell us in the comments or start a forum post.

The OPAN Library is now open, head over to the Library page and take a look through the more than 100 adoption books that are available for loan.

In addition to the coffee groups and get togethers in Auckland, we’d love to hear from the other groups that meet around the country.

We can provide any details you would like on our coffee group page (for example: how often you meet, contact email etc).  And we’d also be happy to list your upcoming coffee group/event on our home page.

Feel free to email us on: info@opan.org.nz, to provide us with your details

PS – We also occasionally get asked for a contact in different areas in New Zealand.  If you’d be happy to be a contact for your area, please let us know.

Sue Kingham from the Adoption Option Trust contacted us and asked if we could circulate this message on the Trust’s behalf…

Things are tough in Christchurch for so many people at the moment. Tracy Matehe, the Adoption Option treasurer, has a badly damaged home. She has decided to move to Australia at the end of April and she will be a huge loss to the Trust.

Sue Kingham, the Chair of the Trust, has lost her home and was traumatised by her experience in the quake. The Trust’s meetings minute taker, Summer Olliver, was severely crushed in the PGC building and will be in hospital for many months.

Everyone in Christchurch has been affected by the quake to some degree. The Adoption Option Trust would just like to put out a request for help to OPAN members in other parts of New Zealand. If you are in a position to get involved we would really appreciate it. This could be the time for The Adoption Option to change how it operates and where it is based. Any ideas welcome.

Please contact Sue Kingham, Chair of the Adoption Option Trust, on 03 3371326 or email kingham.sue@gmail.com.

We stumbled onto the My Creations website last year, and liked the look of their personalised adoption children’s books.

You simply provide some basic details about yourselves, your child, the birth parents, and a little about your unique adoption experience, and from this they customise a story for your child.  In our case: “A Very Special Baby – The Story of Abby”.

The cost was not cheap… Read the rest of this entry →

The Adoptive Families Association of British Columbia (AFABC) have an excellent website.

They publish a magazine for their members, and have made available on their website a large collection of articles from their previous magazines. (I had a quick search under the Category of “Openness” and the search returned 49 articles!) This is a really good (and large) resource of interesting articles across a wide range of adoption related topics. I can’t recommend it enough – take a look.

If you’ve got an adoption site that you’ve found that you’d like to recommend, let us know by posting your recommendations in the comments. Thanks.