Hi all,
This is our first post on here - me and my wife are in our mid-40s (although I think I can technically get away with "early 40s" until my birthday in a few months) and have been thinking about adopting for a while. We don't have any children of our own for various reasons.
Back at the end of October I contacted one of the charities that covers our area and everything initially moved quite quickly, and we had a Teams meeting with one of their social workers in mid-November. We had previously been to an adoption event (back before Covid) run by our local council but found the staff really difficult to engage with, although in hindsight it might be because we went along at the end of an all-day event...
Anyway, we didn't hear anything for about a month so we were going to chase them, but then we had an email asking if we could set up another online meeting - this was a fairly brief meeting and went pretty much as I expected...
My wife has a few medical issues (nothing life-limiting) and has gained quite a lot of weight due to our poor diet and difficulty exercising in the past, which we've struggled to get rid of; she's managed to lose two stone in the last 4-6 months but still has a BMI of over 50, however is under the bariatric service at our local hospital and getting a lot of support from them in terms of possible surgery and/or medication. She doesn't have any complications from her weight and hopefully can avoid them by losing it now. We also don't have any other habits that might be an issue - never smoked, don't really drink, never done drugs etc.
I'm also a bit on the chunky side but not at a level which is going to be an issue (and will probably end dropping my extra weight as our lifestyle is now better)
As I was expecting, at the second meeting we were told that we couldn't move forward until both of us had a BMI of <40; I totally understand why this would be a concern due to the increased risk of poor health etc. The agency were very clear they would close our file and not do anything else until we applied again once all the weight has been lost. They did suggest we might want to consider contacting other agencies though...
Has anyone else had experience with with this situation? We were talking about this over Christmas and were wondering if another agency might be a bit more constructive/co-operative - e.g. could we crack on with the training, background checks, etc. while working on losing weight, and then just not progress to being approved as adopters until we've met the BMI criteria.
We'd be really grateful to hear what other people have experienced in the past, happy new year to you all as well!
