Every adoption is different. International, domestic, state, whatever - they are all different in many ways, but they all come with a mountain of paperwork that we all have fun with during our pre-parenting stage. I'm sure that each process has its own unique requirements, questions and demands of the social workers and other people that come to inspect your house, check your smoke detectors and ask for copies of your car registration (why don't all other parents have to go through this same stuff??!!?? but I digress...).

While we were filling out our fifty page application in four part harmony we got to a part that my husband and I had to fill out separately. I'm trying to remember exactly what we were being asked, but it had a lot to do with how we were brought up, how our parents treated us, what kind of things did we do for fun growing up, and similar questions asking us how we envision raising, disciplining, and teaching our children about their background. It also asked us about how we would describe each other, best and worst qualities, etc. After taking time to fill out our own identical sections, we compared notes. Our answers were very similar in some areas, and very different in many, many others.

For us, I think that this was a good process to go through. It forced us to face our differences in our marriage that would have an effect on us as parents. It gave us time to talk about hypothetical future situations dealing with our future hypothetical children. We talked about how we would raise our hypothetical children in our religion, and at what point we would be doing the conversion to Judaism. I learned a lot about my husband's upbringing that somehow we had glossed over before. He learned a lot from me about, well, Childcare 101 (other titles have since been added to include "How to hold a baby: For Dummies" and "How to shorten a lecture to fit a 2-year-old's attention span" and "No, you may not dress her in that")

Pre-parenting was good preparation, and gave us something to talk about while waiting for that phone call. I often wonder what sort of parents we would be had we not gone through the experience of that fifty page application.