And so it begins…

Introductions are over and we are now in full Parental Responsibility mode. Before I say anything about the introductions in general I have a list of observations. 1. Get used to drinking formerly hot drinks cold, or only half of them, or not at all. Certainly get used to searching for randomly placed cups with full or half drunk drinks in them once the children are in bed. 2. Children somehow generate crumbs. Even if they have not had anything to eat, they are just there on the carpet inexplicably. 3. Forbidden things are nectar to children. Nothing is sacred,

Introducing Introductions

One year ago today we officially got accepted onto the adoption agency’s books, and entered The Process. One year later we met our children for the first time. From the outset it was clear that the foster carer had been preparing them for meeting us and the first words spoken, fairly unprompted, by one of the children was “It’s Daddy and Dad”. Definitely heart melting! We only spent a couple of hours with them today, and an amazing couple of hours it was. We saw a little bit of foster carer discipline which was very good to see, did a

Matching Panel

So, just before being able to write a post about Matching Panel I was “advised” to stop writing my blog publicly. This post is the first one I’ve written since then and is intended to be privately published. Despite having been “advised” for a good 10 minutes about why I shouldn’t write it I am still unclear on the precise reasoning behind it. Anyway, we had Panel. We were asked a few questions about how we will cope, including about recent losses and how that will affect OH. We were asked about how we would deal with questions about birth

The Final Straight Approaches

We have met the foster carer, met the medical advisor, met the children’s new social worker and have had written confirmation of our matching panel date through the post. All systems are go for leaping that final hurdle and on to the final straight. The foster carer is clearly a very lovely person who is very caring towards the children we are trying to adopt. In fact, the whole foster family seems absolutely brilliant, which means that there are some very large shoes to fill! The foster carer whisked us away from the social workers during our meeting, stealing my pad

Goodbyes and Hellos

We’ve said some goodbyes over the last two weeks. Firstly to our Social Worker who came to the end of her placement for her course, so has moved on. She has to finish her course with dissertations and other such academic things, then she’ll be starting her new job. We have enjoyed working with her and really appreciate the hard work she has put in to getting us as far as we did within the time she had with us. There were some hiccups along the way, and we still aren’t absolutely certain of the future, but she was there

Under Repair

Where to begin (this is going to be a long one!)… As it turns out in my post Linked when I said we were officially linked apparently I was wrong, it was just a provisional link. I have now corrected that blog post. We have since learnt that our agency have something called a Family Linking Meeting (FLM) which is where the link is made official. Just after the aforementioned blog post we had a meeting with the Family Finder (FF) social worker and the children’s social worker (CSW). While we didn’t necessarily feel that meeting went very well, we were

Support

The last couple of weeks have been very hard for us. Something that has become so incredibly clear to us has been the level of total unconditional support that we have from pretty much everyone we know, and even people we don’t. So, this post is a massive thank you! We cannot express how lucky we feel to have you all behind us. The New Family Social forum has been absolutely brilliant, after I posted a message on there we received many messages of support and advice, all of which have been vital. The comments on my previous blog post

Broken

Never have I understood the words “if things seem too good to be true, they probably are” more than today. We are broken. Despite driving things forward at an incredible pace since late January, the family finder social worker has severed our link with the siblings for reasons we are yet to know or understand. We are devastated, not just for us but for the children, in my opinion they have been wronged too. I have nothing else to say.

Linked

Let me rewind a few weeks back to before we were approved and when I wrote this: Connections. In it I wrote “Our social worker has also provided some information about another sibling group and that too sounds promising” but I haven’t mentioned anything since. The reason I hadn’t was because those children hadn’t yet been given a Placement Order meaning that they couldn’t be adopted but only kept in foster care until such time as they got one, which may not ever happen. We were approached by these siblings’ family finder social worker rather than the other way around,