The Next Steps - 28th April

     Well if you have been following along our journey you'll know that about a week and a half ago we had one of those days. The kind of day that you remember, you mark it in your mind and by celebrating. We did on Thursday the 17th April at 4:17 by firstly jumping up and down, a couple of tears of joy and quickly planning a get together that evening at the RedFort (our favourite Indian restaurant, a one minute walk from our house) and driving to friends houses to alert them in person. We had been approved, the wait to reach that exit was over, now it was on to the next steps. We've had many questions tossed our way, what are the next steps? what do you do now? when does a child come to you? do you get one from the hospital? and on and on the questions have come. I'll attempt to give an overview, we'll see how it goes...

     Our agency has contact with local authorities all across the UK, and have access to the children who are in care and waiting for an adoptive family. Almost all of these children are in foster families, some since they were newly born and others at an older age after they were removed from their homes. Rebecca and I have been approved to adopt either 1 or 2 children up to the age of five. This means that we are eligible to adopt a sibling pair, twins or one child provided they are under the age of five.

     Essentially what happens is that we receive profiles of waiting children from our agency through email. There is a person at the agency who is a family finder and she connects waiting children profiles with people like us who are approved to adopt. These are usually short 2-4 page intros including a picture, some family background, a few thoughts from their social worker and the child's likes/dislikes. Sometimes we get a full report on a child/children which includes all the family background, names of people involved in their life/lives, reasons for removal from the home, hopes and wishes of the parents and much more detail. These can be exhausting to read through, but they are very useful in deciding if a child/children is potentially a right fit for our family.

     It is very weird to look through profiles of children, and to declare to ourselves and the agency that we cannot pursue them any further. By pursuing I mean that we ask for more information, we state that we are interested in our social worker making contact or of us being contacted, or of being shortlisted. If we are short-listed on a child/children then a date of meeting their social worker would be decided upon, and a visit to our home would take place.

     We have already said no to a couple of profiles, for various reasons we knew that we could not go further with the waiting children. We are certain that the right one/ones are out there though. We have not traveled this far in the process to rush things or to get frustrated, this is part of the excitement, just very different from the American process where we would be waiting to be chosen, now we are somewhat doing the choosing. We will continue to blog about this process realising that some of the information is confidential and we'll need to be quite vague at times, not using proper names, locations etc... until there are formal and certain aspects of the process in place. Thank you so much for standing with us and encouraging us up to this point, there is more to come and we so look forward to it all!