Since being told we had a place on the October Preparation Group it has been total radio silence from the adoption agency. We know the dates that is it happening, but we don’t know where it is, what time it starts, if we need to do anything in preparation or if we need to take anything with us. In other words we feel totally unprepared for the Preparation Group.
Then, at the tail end of last week, it changed. I was phoned by the Team Manager of the adoption team at the agency’s local office. I assume this means she’s the one who is in charge of the social workers who do the home studies and write up the PAR (Prospective Adopter’s Report) which is key to getting recommended for approval at Panel at the end of Stage 2.
As I was at work, I missed the call, but she left a nice long voicemail introducing herself and telling me that she will email us, which she did a couple of minutes later asking for a good time to call us. I replied as requested and was told that she would be contacting us at the end of this week with details of who we will be working with in Stage 2. She also reconfirmed that we were booked onto the October Preparation Group (with no further details).
As promised we heard from her again yesterday telling us the name of the “Senior Practitioner” who will be dealing with our case and that she would be in contact to arrange a time to visit us (via email as we again missed her call!). I replied again with thanks and asked about the Preparation Group (We had intended to chase them up shortly anyway so this seemed like a good opportunity).
The reply came from the Senior Practitioner assigned to us, telling us that we were definitely on the October Prep Group, and that, having just contacted them, the recruitment team said they usually send the details out the week before. She also asked about dates the week after the prep group for meeting us to discuss Stage 2. All this was achieved within a few minutes, so fairly impressive, I hope it continues like that! And I hope that we get along with the social worker, she’ll be invading our home and writing a very in-depth report about us and our lives, that isn’t going to go well if we don’t like each other!
Having just worked it out, the radio silence only really lasted a couple of weeks. Why did that seem so long? I must become more patient.
In other news: I am now biologically related to someone who will call me “Uncle”… Huge congratulations to my brother and his wife who have a new son, my first nephew and my parents’ first grandchild!
