Bonding Evaluation - fost/adopt

As part of the adoption process, we are required to go through a bonding evaluation with Lil J. I really don't understand all the processes, since his mother also had to do a bonding eval.

As of now, he is NOT going to be returned to his mother, so not sure why a bonding eval is even needed for her. But, whatever. We do whatever the court order states.

I did a bunch of google searches about the bonding eval, since I really wanted to be prepared for this. I really did not find anything, so I thought I would post about it here.

The eval took place in one of the visitation rooms at the local office. We were told ahead of time that it would take about 1-2 hours.

The eval was Lil J, me and my husband, and of course the "dr" - who I assume was psychologist.

He asked each of us a series of questions, silly questions if you ask me. Things that are in our file. After the fact, I realized that all the questions are questions that everyone has an answer to. And, they are simple enough that you never have to think about the answer.

The questions were things like: where we grew up, where we went to school (HS and college); what our majors were, where we worked (last 2 jobs); how many siblings we have; if our parents are still together; what our parents do for work; who lives in our house, and their age; if we were ever arrested; treated for depression; have anger issues; stuff like that.

The entire time we are answering questions, Lil J is either playing by himself, or playing with the other person.

And, since the questions were so easy to answer, of course the person answering questions is still interacting with Lil J. I guess that was the point of the "easy" questions.

After all the questions were answered, the Dr said that we could just play for a little while. So, we just took Lil J's lead and did what we would have done at home. Just played. Read stories, etc. The entire time, the Dr was taking notes. Who knows what he was writing, but I can't imagine anything bad. In my case, maybe he wrote that I did not get down on the floor. But, he also knew I JUST had a baby, with a C-section. So, I am sure he did not hold that against me LOL

All in all, it was pretty painless. It took about an hour. But, some of that was us just chatting.