very quick update

exhausted, so won’t stay long. have had our first court date which was short and sweet. and everything sounds very positive and we have a final date for less than two weeks away!! apparently the paperwork was done so well, that the second hearing can be missed out. this is good news.

finally, step one!

finally, our entire application to adopt, and all of the bits that go with it and support it, has /have gone into the courts! We were told on friday, by a very nice social worker, who came to assess us, but who we have never met before. (we kind of wish she had been there as the one to do those visits from the start.) EVEN all the medical faff has come back and been submitted to court (and i was assessed ok to parent, even though i’ve just been struggling in my first real relapse in five years over the last month). now we’re just waiting for three court dates.

the first hearing we don’t attend, just the social workers. the first hearing is just for the judge to say ‘we need this and this and that, so you and you and you do it and get back to me on such and such a date’ (hopefully s/he’ll be a little more precise in the actual hearing itself!) the second hearing mr. dots and i must attend, but not Little One. (anybody free to babysit for that one?) the second is so the judge can say ‘ok, so did you and you and you get this and this and that? ok, in that case we will look at this and this and that on such and such a date.’

the third hearing date is the BIG one. that one all three of us need to attend. even the birth parents are invited to attend (but we’ve been assured that 1. they have no intention to coming and 2. if they did, we’d be ferried in through a back door and kept seperate so our identities would never be known. how? i dunno, but i’m not thinking of that possibility. anyway, the third one is the one where the judge makes his/her final rulling on what is best for LO, either stay with us as her parents, legally and forever, or be returned back to her birth parents, who she has never lived with and really only has known through regular scheduled and supervised visits at a community centre.

it’s a no brainer. She has lived with and known us as her parents for six months of her short 2 year life, she has completely settled and come to know our life as her life, our home as her home, our pets as her pets, and her toys/bed/room/neighbourhood as her toys/bed/room/neighbourhood. she has friends and community and this and that and the other thing, or she could be sent to live with people who she barely knows (and probably doesn’t remember) and who have been legally assessed as unable to care for her. i don’t want to diminish her birth parents’ trauma, but her home and world is with us now. i can’t believe that any judge would say otherwise. we have no worries about the final ruling. we just want it to be over and done with.

then no one has jurisdiction over us anymore. then our name is legally her name, so that we can stop trying to explain to doctors and officials and etc. etc. why we’re with a child with a different surname to ours. then we can stop having official people phone us up and tell us where we have to be and when and how we have to act and do.

then. . . it’s over! we don’t know when yet. pray it comes quickly.

courts

i’ve archived the last gut wrenching few posts and am going to assume a more relaxed air of normal family. however normal a family with a 2 year old in it can be. i keep saying that “we are 4 month old parents of a 2 year old!” how ‘normal’ could that be??

that’s not to say that the ‘gut wrenching-ness’ isn’t still happening, but we’ve just been doing it long enough now to ignore it a bit better. and besides, i love the concept of being able to archive trauma.

also my main reason for stopping in here to update is to let you know that we have now been ‘invited’ to apply to the courts to make this a LEGAL adoption.

prayer requests on this point are:

1. that our agency’s medical advisor doesn’t need to go back to my neurologist for an update and will accept the simple overview that my GP has sent him, as waiting on the consultant could REALLY hold things up. (especially since my consultant of 12 years is leaving in June and handing over to someone i’ve never met before)
2. that said med advisor will get off his bum and decide this QUICKLY (he has been sitting on it for awhile now and has sat on things in the past. he needs to stand up and MOVE more!)
3. that once full and completed application is into the courts, the hearing dates (3 of them) are planned for very soon available dates and there are no hold up’s or cancellations (except cancellations that would get us seen quicker)
4. that the renewing of our CRB (criminal records bureau) checks do not hold things up.

do you get the feeling that we’re really pretty eager to have this all done and dusted as QUICKLY as possible and to remove ourselves from the constant surveillance of social services et al. and to just get on with day to day family life?

because the day to day family stuff is just great, really.

families. non fragmented, non individualised, *whole* families.

mountain snow tiger asked: “Do you think the difficulties and heartache are being caused by the adoption system itself or by the particular people implementing it in your case or a bit of both?”

the simple answer is ‘both.’ but it gets a bit more complex than that, and when it comes down to it, it ends up being an intrinsic problem with the system that created those individuals.

There have been a few individuals who have made mistakes, been insensitive, unsupportive and have said and done things that have been downright damaging. There have been a few individuals who have been incapable of understanding our needs as a family in order to thrive and from most a clear lack of empathy with myself as a new mother suffering from P.A.D.S and a lack of experience with women having the same struggle. There have been individuals who made bad choices and forced bad decisions and who didn’t listen to what we felt, thought and believed was in the best interest for our daughter and our family.

And maybe the biggest mistake of all was made by ourselves, in trusting all of those individuals more than we trusted ourselves from the start.

Those were all individuals and their own mistakes and faults. We have forgiven some, i would be lying if I were to say we have yet been able to forgive all.

However, we firmly believe that said individuals would not have made those mistakes if the system itself had the capacity to properly support a family in order to hold it together rather than institutionalising social workers into behaviours that in effect tear it apart.

In Anne Atkins’s book Child Rearing for Fun: Trust your Instincts and Enjoy your Children she talks a bit about working with professionals. I found that I could identify with her apprasial of social services in her section on “Professionals to Avoid”:

“Unfortunately there are some professionals whose effect on a normal healthy family is so destructive that I would advise having as little as possible to do with them. . .

“. . . Social Services are there to help, yes, but in specific circumstances, notably when the family has failed. This is neccessary, even noble: if a child is being beaten by a drunken stepfather, abused by a lecherous lodger or neglected by a mentally ill mother, of course society must intervene. . . But think about it. You know if your child is being beaten, starved or tortured. If she were, you wouldn’t be wasting time reading this book. But other people do not know for sure, and if their remit is to protect children it is their duty to assume the worst. So if there is even a chance that any abuse is going on, social services have to step in and pull the family apart in order to rescue the child. Of course they do.” — Anne Atkins Child Rearing for Fun

What I’m saying is that the same system that is there to protect the needs of a child by removing her from parents who can not care for her can in very little way meet the needs of a new family that is trying to bond together. if all of your senses are primed to look for potential problems, then you are not going to be focussed on finding sollutions. if your reactions are tuned into protecting by keeping apart, then you are less able to support people in holding together. if you are trained to see hints of negatives, you’re generally not going to be very good at encouraging positives. i am not saying that the protection and awareness of potential problems should not be there for a Child Protection Social Worker, I am saying that once you are dealing with making new families, there needs to be a different approach by Adoption Social Workers.

I only fully realised recently that we are not just waiting for a piece of paper from the courts to make us a legal family, we are waiting to be accepted by the system as parents not just guardians. I guess we had naively thought that even though we’d be waiting a little while for the law to acknowledge us as a family, that everyone else would accept us as one. That was never the case. In effect we’re still having to prove ourselves.

We have always believed so firmly that adoption is about making families. It has taken us this long to reluctantly accept that it just simply is not the case in this country. My Bible memory is not good enough to remember where exactly the verse comes from that says that we are all members of the same body and a hand can not be more important than a foot or vice versa (or something like that), each member being in different roles, but equally valid/valued and important. And we see family that way. But when it comes to adoption in the UK, parents are seen as an expendable comodity. For the past 2 and a half years we have coninually been made to feel that we, as parents, do not matter and do not need to be looked after. I am not trying to diminish the worth of a child, I am trying to emphasise how important we see the Family, as a whole, all members together.

So I guess that’s a long way of saying, yes, mountain snow tiger, we do see that the problems are essentially with the system, and it’s inability to focus on families. We see individual social workers as making grave mistakes, but that they made those mistakes because that’s how the system works. The system sees a child and his/her needs as being seperate from the needs of the family. But how can a family meet a child’s needs if the needs of the family are not only being neglected, but being put under strain, with no support, understanding or empathy?

But when you take it down to bare bones, isn’t family, good, healthy, nurturing families and succeeding in getting them for all children, what it’s all about?

Wiblog entry for 10/03/2008

Ok, we disappeared. Disappeared into a blurry, teary, firey haze full of transitional labour pains, heartache, joy, and nappies. (the tears and fire coming whenever a social worker phones us or crosses the threshold of our home bringing their scrutiny and assessment notepads with them, the labour pains coming everytime we start to feel like she belongs to/with us but then they are there to remind us that she’s “not ours yet, she never has been and they could still take her back if we do something they don’t like” or something to that effect. . . the joy coming the first time LittleOne allowed me to hold her hand [sometime around mid February], the nappies coming about 4 or 5 times a day.)

Sorry.

Gladly, things are finally starting to go well for our new family. As far as our family, the three of us, on our own, left to get on with being a family on our own and with our friends, that is. I love being a family, when they allow us to be.

Sadly, things have not gone well in terms of the invasive proceedure that is known as ‘adoption placement’. (Adoption Placement - The point at which a child begins to live with prospective parents. The period before the adoption is finalized/made legal.) We were never prepared for the scrutiny to continue in quite this way. We weren’t prepared for the insensitivities and “miscommunications” (i call them lies, but i get told off by our social worker if i refer to it that way) that have pervaded the last two months, just as we were trying to learn how to do this new parent thing. A stressful thing, even when your new baby isn’t 18 mo old and walking around and getting into everything and just beginning to clutch at her own independence when you’re trying so hard to attach!

There have been blatant mistakes made that have created more stress, depression, hurt, fear and shock than ever should have been allowed. We keep saying “no one should have to start a family this way.”

I paint a grim picture, and I’m sorry, that’s just my honesty. The same honesty that so often gets us so in to trouble. What isn’t grim, is the potential that is beginning to emerge from our family. We fit together, we do. And once the legal Adoption Order comes through the courts, we will finally be allowed to get on and enjoy it.

We are a family. Now, let’s just pray that the systems acknowledge that sooner rather than later.

tomorrow we meet our little one!

haven’t been online in ages. been trying to get done in two weeks what most parents have 9 months to do. going to bed now, while i leave me friends to put up stair gates.

lost in interpretation

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

welcome to your decision to adopt. you must now learn a new language and begin to relate to others in different terms to what you have done. they will continue to hear you use your old language, but you won’t be using it. they will expect you to mean one thing when you speak, but you will mean another. but you’re not allowed to tell them that. in fact you can’t tell them anything. speaking, and communicating are no longer necessarily the same thing. neither are explaining and understanding. the truth can be true without being completely accurate. and telling falsehoods is no longer always lying. you have spent 20/30/40/50 or so years learning what reality is. forget it all when speaking with someone who speaks this language.

this could be a confusing post. it involves me walking around inside my head and our experience and trying to explain what is there and what has been there. however it involves me trying to do that and to communicate to you in a language that you probably don’t know (even though you might think you do). some of you will have heard this language before. some of you will be fluent, some of you will know a few words and some of your will be comepletely lost, but it’s unlikely that you will know which one of those three you are even if you think you do (fluent, few words, or lost - although fluency does bring with it knowledge of certain ’secret handshakes’ that you can identify each other by). therefore this will be a confusing post. i’ll come back later and try to explain the simpler practicalities of matching panel.

i will once again attempt in all of my wibblingness to clarify things. i just thought i’d try to explain, how we have used this blog and why. the why bit will come towards the end. we have gathered from talking to friends who read this blog that different people understand different things to differing levels and to different levels of accuracy. this is inevitable. the process is steeped in secrecy, which is fine, but confusing. not only for you, but for us too. from day to day what qualifies as ‘confidential’ slightly changes a bit in a way, and we’ve had to ask you for patience. i have realised, whereas up til now we have lived our lives amongst good friends who we trust and who we share things with, that now even those closest to us haven’t got a clue what we have been doing/learning/working/going to/attending/fretting about/hoping for/rejoicing because/managing/juggling/planning/preparing/dealing with/processing/coping with/add verb here ad infinitum…those things are natural to us now. the things we know are second nature. we’re talking about our child, they are our every minute. but they’re not yours.

that’s fine and as it should be, but i realise this when i see someone who i know ‘knows’ me. i suddenly realise that that person hasn’t done all of those things with us when i have a conversation like this:

‘hi’
‘hi, any adoption news?’
‘well, yes, we’re going to matching panel this week where a recommendation will be made as to a match with our child.’
‘oo that’s exciting! do you know anything about them? do you know if it will be a boy or a girl?’

wham! smack! bang! i’ve just driven my car straight into the ‘HELLO!!’ sign that has jumpped out in front of me and i suddenly have the revelation that ‘oh, my gosh, they have no idea what i did/found out/decided yesterday/last week/last month even though they do read the blog, and i can’t tell them.’ i guess at this stage, and after what we know and what we have done since september, it kind of feels like someone asking an author who is about to send his book to the publisher whether he knows if his book is going to be long or shot.

that’s all fine and as it should be, i just sometimes forget. it has been complicated even more by the fact that not everybody understands the same things to mean the same thing, and that’s fine and as it should be too, we just have to remember who understands what by what. a=a however a=the first letter of the alphabet too. both are correct. but who is going to think ‘a’ when you say ‘a’ and who is going to think ‘the first letter of the aphabet’ when you say ‘a’? both are correct and accurate, but slightly different.

it’s like when you go to church on a sunday morning and your elderly friend gives you sympathy for your headache because they care and they understand that headaches hurt. and your best mate gives you sympathy for your headache because they understand WHY you have the headache (and they probably have one too cause they were probably at the same party the night before) you’ve told both people the SAME thing “i have a headache” but they understand it differently to each other.

and that’s fine and as it should be. it can just get a little confusing when trying to remember how everyone is going to intrepret everything. we need to remember who is going to interpret ‘i have a headache’ as just what it says, and who is going to interpret ‘i have a headache’ as ‘i went to a party last night’.

ok, to ‘why write the blog’, and particularly why write the blog if we can’t tell you everything? one simple answer. support, and you’ve all been tops! way back in the very first (ish) post or so, i said the intention was to ‘documment’ our journey. well, we’ve done that to some degree, but the deeper we got and the more we knew and the more we knew about what we couldn’t doccument, we haven’t told you everything along the way. it’s a story with holes in it. the ‘documentation’ is going to have to happen privately for us. many of the posts, like the one below, like the posts nov 06, aug 07 etc, often come at turning points, crisis points or times when we just need a good whinge or a good hug. and you have allways allowed the whinges and provided the hugs, so thank you.

so forget the whinges, forget the crises, things are ok now, because you were there to dish out the hugs and shoulders, but of course ‘ok’ only ‘for now’. unfortunately, it may not give you the most accurate picture of the whole, but you don’t need a completely accurate picture of the whole. we’ll get there in the end, and we know you’ll still be there, and that’s what counts.

i must go for now, but i’ll be back later i’m sure… and possibly because the postman has just been, and the thing that was meant to be in the post for another deadline was unsurprisingly not in the post! grr.

but that’s the process, and this is the choice we’ve made. . . and that’s fine and as it should be .

Things you don’t have to do when getting a child the biological way

(A rare Mr Dots entry)

The biological method of acquiring a child is somewhat more straightforward than doing so by adoption (unless there are problems of course). It is arguably more pleasurable. I say arguably because it definitely is from the man’s side, but I am conscious that childbirth can smart a bit.

So I thought I would make a list of the things that you don’t have to do when getting a child biologically, that you do have to do when getting one bureaucratically by adoption. In reading the list, it may become apparent what hitch we’ve just hit this afternoon.

Maybe these procedures should be introduced though? It would certainly make sure people really wanted to be a parent. Maybe there should be social workers stationed outside people’s bedrooms. ‘Before you procreate, Mr and Mrs Smith, would you mind just doing the following?’

1. A year long assessment by social workers to determine whether you’re fit to parent.
2. A judge and jury (occasionally called ‘adoption panel’) deciding whether you’re fit to parent.
3. CRB/FBI checks. Look at the November 2006 archive.
4. Chasing people up by phone. All the time.
5. PEOPLE FORGETTING TO GET YOU TO SIGN AN IMPORTANT FORM WHICH MEANS THAT YOUR PANEL DATE IS GOING TO GET DELAYED GRRRRR (this sort of thing just happens all the time)
6. Agree to never again walk naked through the house (no really. It’s not that I do this much, but we have to be ‘dressed appropriately at all times’).
7. Have a health and safety assessment done on your house
8. A preparation course and competency assessment
9. Work out how you’re going to handle it when you discover your 14 year old son with a porn mag.
10. Signing a form after having the child with you for 6 months to say that they’re really yours now.

And I could go on. And yes, you need most of the above in place, kind of. And we put ourselves through it with eyes mostly open. It’s just… just… just…
That I want our family to be ours, on our terms. Not a social worker’s. I think that’s as natural as biology, and all of the above gets in the way.

what happened to ‘9 months’ to prepare?

well, we had never anticipated needing to buy certain things in preparation for our little one. and we never really anticipated not having much time to do the said ‘no buying’ in. in other words, and without giving too much away, we have taken our first foray into the aisles of mothercare. we wouldn’t have dared venture into such a shop before, but now the fact that we need to replace the single bed in our ’spare room’ for a cot (’crib’ for you americans) in our ‘nursery’ is starting to hit home, and fast. (by the way, yes we’ve had lots of offers of cots from friends, but we have something specific in mind, so thanks, but we’ll probably buy one)

“when is the baby due?” asked the shop assistant as we hovered by one cot/bed. (a cot/bed is a cot (crib) that can convert into a bed and be suitable til 5 years of age)

“well . . . possibly january. maybe before christmas. we’re not sure. we’re adopting,” qualifies a very noticably un-pregnant me.

and to be honest, Little One is on the cusp of leaving the cot for a bed, but we don’t want to put them through more changes than they need to handle all at once. Little One is using a crib now, so we won’t both take them out of the home that they know and put them straight into a brand new furniture experience quite yet. thus, a cot/bed.

in the uk, when you decide to adopt and enter into the whole adoption thing, you are told, taught, and prepared to accept that “you won’t have a baby, there are no babies.” and for the most part this is true. the reality of the system is such that even for newborns who go straight into foster care and even for the very few babies who are relinquished by their birth mothers, it takes time.

if you’ve seen the last series of Friends, you will be aware of at least a simplistic caricature of a process of linking up an adopting family with a pregnant birth mother before the birth so that the baby goes straight to the adoptive home from the hospital. that doesn’t happen here in britain. it just doesn’t. and whereas that particular storyline had quite a bit of hollywood thrown into it, essentially, it does happen in america. so, just so you know, no, we will not have a very little baby, cause we’re here in britain. we have said that from the start and we still stick to that. but the difference between a child who can sleep in a bed and a todler who is still using a cot is very big for us. . . and what we had pictured for our future.

we can’t blog about many things, but we can blog about the emotions of what it feels like to wander into the nappy aisle in the supermarket with intent for the first time. one word. overwhelming. you just don’t get 9 months to adjust to the idea that this is going to be real in your life and for these things to become normalised. in fact every bit of advice you recieve tells you (and we believe rightly so, from what we have experienced so far) not to move forward too fast. not to set up your nursary and make some kind of shrine or altar to your imaginary baby that will remain ready and waiting possibly for years. . . and then you find out that your child is 4! so as everything has been unknown, we didn’t do that. you don’t go out and buy your wedding dress before you’ve met the bloke. (well, ok, some people do, but) and the first time you go shopping for something like a wedding dress after you’re with the bloke and you’re pretty sure things are going to work out for a long time, that first time you go looking for ‘rights of passage’ things like a wedding dress is scary and emotional and unreal, but if you go window shopping a bit before you buy, it becomes less so. so that’s kind of what we’re doing cot-wise. the first bouts of window shopping and normalisation.

but the stage we are at now is much closer than we have ever been before. we have agreement from both sides, and so far everyone is happy, in principle. . . it’s NOT official yet, but we ARE in a position to plan now, which we have never been before. planning doesn’t happen until the last minute. planning doesn’t happen until you’ve met with the social workers from the little one’s side of things and they say that they want you.

i suppose it’s a bit like surfing or using rollerblades for first time. at first, you don’t try lots of stunts and ask lots of friends along to watch you cause youknow you’re going to fall down, and even if you don’t there was a pretty good chance you were going to, so you don’t want to set up an audience for it. by the time you have been surfing or rollerblading for awhile longer and you know you can do it, and you know you can do the stunts and you’re confident, then you can enter competitions and have an audience to watch you do the cool stunts. you can still fall down, but you can be a bit more confident that you won’t.

i mean the analogy doesn’t completely follow, becuase in surfing and rollerblading, it’s all about practice and preparation and work, and in adoption theres a lot more chances and outside influences that you can’t control involved. in fact, perhaps surfing is a better analogy, cause no matter how much work you put in, there can always be that killer tidal wave that will knock you down no matter what you do! but the other truth of surfing, is that if you doubt too much that you’re going to stay upright, then it’s pretty certain you wont. you won’t be prepared for a big wave when it comes, because you never prepared, becuase you never thought you’d stay up in the first place.

so we’re just preparing and approaching the waves with confidence. not naivety, but knowledgable confidence.

“hurry up and wait. . . wait, wait, and hurry up!” or, “the story so far”

when i was 8, my older sister joined the u.s. marrine corps and went to boot camp. her career with the marrines didn’t come to fruition, but that’s not my story. the lasting memory i have from her letters home at that time was she said that the most frustrating thing was that the drill instructors were always shouting at them to hurry up. or more accurately, to HURRY UP!. but she said that after they, the privates, had all hurried up and done whatever they were meant to do. . . nothing ever happened. they just had to wait. and wait and wait. so she could never quite figure out wbat all the hurry was about. “hurry up and wait” she called it.

well, isn’t that just a picture of the adoption system in reverse? no sooner do i blog to tell you that no, nothing’s happening, we were going to be taking it easy after our loss, i was looking for jobs (by the way, i didn’t get that one i interviewed for… once again came in second!), and we were going to enjoy a nice quiet Christmas with Mr. Dot’s family . . . . . . . when

BAM!!!

some kind of nuclear adoption bomb blows up in our midst and the fallout started settling around us before we knew it.

24 september - i blog that nothing is happening and we will be taking it easy til the new year
25 september - call from E (our SW) giving no details, but asking us to do some research
26 september - call to E from us, saying we would like more information about whatever she was thinking. E tells us to enquire about a little one who’s profile will be one of those featured at the event (more info below) we would attend on
27 september - we attend an event run annually by our local consortium. a local consortium is a collective group of local authorities (local governments. city/town/county social services departments are in local governments which are called ‘authorities’ here in the UK). i will try to explain. If you already understand what a local consortium does, you might want to skip this next paragraph.

for example say the country of Atlantis had two regions, North and South and that North Atlantis was split into 4 counties, A, B, C and D and that South Atlantis had 3 counties, E, F and G. Adoption Social Work teams would exist in each county and would assess both children who need adopting and parents who want to adopt. the team in county A would generally not be able to place a child in county A with parents who also live in A, for child protection reasons. So the adoption team in county A looks to B, C, and D (and then maybe even to E, F and G) for potential parents for their child. To make this task a bit easier for the adoption teams in the whole of North Atlantis, A, B, C and D get together and form a consortium so that information and posible links between children and parents become a bit easier. South Atlantis might form a different consortium in their region. Adoption becomes a little bit easier bureaucratically when it happens within a region. This was one of the difficulties with our last possible link, as she was outside of our own consortium and region.

ok, back to the timeline.

27 September - we attend an event held by our local consortium, where all the member counties attend and set up a stall at a conference venue. approved adoptive parents who are waiting to be linked with a child (that’s us) are invited by the consortium to attend. so the parents (again, that’s us) attend and go to each stall and talk to different children’s social workers about the children they are looking to place. considerations are made in any decision to ‘express interest’ in a child to both a child’s needs and the parents’ ability to meet those needs. in other words, you can’t really persue a possible link with a child whose needs you can not meet. however, if you can, then you have the opportunity to speak to social workers who work directly with that child and get a bit more information.

this is not the usual way that ‘links’ are made between parents and children in consortiums, and as indicated by Smudgie’s comment on the last post “I’ve always felt a little relieved that our consortium doesn’t do these adoption events - it saves me having to think what I think about them.” these events have pros AND cons about them and can have a little bit of controversy.

but as we were alerted by E to a child we may want to find out a bit more about, we went to the county’s stall, looked at their profile and spoke to one of child’s social workers. this went extremely well. surprisingly well. swimmingly well. in fact we’d probably say that we hit it off with CSW1 (child’s SW #1). but we didn’t want to get too excited yet and decided as we had only just got to the event, we would go to all the other counties with an open mind and see if there were any other possibilities for us. there were, but by the end of the evening we decided that the first child we spoke to CSW1 about was the possibility we wanted to persue.

at this stage CSW1 agreed to let us see a short video of the child. CSW2 took us to a little private room where we sat in front of a laptop and had our hearts stollen away. and this is also when CSW2 let the question slip “oh, so are you the couple who were already linked with this child?”

errr. . . that we had not been told. but yes, later it was confirmed that just a few days before the event the consortium had made a possible link between us and this child in the usual way, and E didn’t want to tell us, because she wanted to give us a chance to go to the event and see what came out of it and what our feelings were at the end of the evening. she was very aware that there could be other children featured at the event who we felt made a better match with us. but we didn’t. how very exciting.

which brings us to

4 October - exactly a week after the event and having met CSW1, E came out to see us with an anonymised version of the child’s form that held all of the detailed information that had been collected about the child and the child’s birth parent situation. (those are things we can say nothing about. this blog is only about our own journey so far, not about any particular children.) after this meeting with E, we still wanted to proceed.
8 October- we get a call to say that the next step meeting which would be with E, and us, and CSW1, CSW2 & CSW3 at our house would take place in the afternoon on
9 October - which was yesterday. wow. 4 SWs and us. in OUR little house. they came to our house, we made tea and put out buiscuits. we asked and answered questions. what a massive, big, important and overwhelming meeting that was and by the end of it, it was clear that everyone was still happy for things to progress further to make a match between us and this child.

this is not the end of the line for us yet. there are still lots of reports to write and meetings to be had and steps to go through and another panel to attend and get a decision from and then another ‘decision maker’ to ratify it before we can start planning introducitons. but the fact is, we are now in a position to be confident about planning introductions. we have even SEEN a video of the little one who it looks most likely will very soon be our little one.

it has only been 2 weeks and 2 days since my last entry when i said “all activity has come to a halt for now”

and God laughed.