In the education classes, there were about 24 people and surprisingly about 75% of us had kids already! A couple of families had 3 kids, and one family even has 4 kids. We had been expecting most couples to be adopting because of infertility, but clearly this isn't the case (at least not in our group).
Anyway, the topics we talked about included grief and loss (both our own and our future adopted child's), understanding the child's need to know/connect in some way with their biological family, culture and identity, and the adoption process in general. We had speakers come and talk to us about their experiences - including a birth mother who'd given up her baby for adoption, several adoptive parents, and an adult adoptee. It was great to hear their real-life stories and be able to ask questions of them.
The next stage involves us doing quite a bit of "homework" - we have to complete 3 things:
1. Family tree - including our grandparents and then all their children and descendants. This is very easy for me since I research family history as a hobby!! It is proving more difficult for Jerome as he's never looked into his side before, and his mum is one of 10 children, while his dad is one of 8 children! It's going to be quite a big tree!
2. Country project - this is to help us learn about China, and is also for us to teach our children about China, so it will be mostly in the form of a picture book. We've got some creative ideas about this, so stay tuned!
3. Life stories - each of us has to answer 122 questions about our life! The questions range from easy (where were you born?) to quite in-depth (describe your experiences growing up, from pre-school to early adulthood, etc etc). I'm up to 8 pages already and still plenty more questions to answer!
We have 3 months to do our homework, but we hope to finish it much sooner. Jerome starts his next lot of studies in mid-June, so it would be good to get it out of the way before then. So as you can imagine, that is taking up all our spare time right now!