Home study visit 8 - and some big developments

Since my last post - a lot has been going on - well emotionally it has anyway! At our last assessment visit, we were asked to consider the boys we had spent our case study time looking at, as being a potential match.

I held back on my last blog update, because we wanted to make sure we had some time to think. We've then had a 2 week gap as our social worker was away. In that time, it's fair to say, we've done nothing but think, and plan, and talk to friends and family. The truth is, despite the fact that the boys we've been asked to consider don't match the age profile that we started out with, we have both absolutely fallen for them! Of course, we've only had two photos and about four pages of text about them, but everything about them somehow feels like it's meant to be. We are trying hard not to get too carried away, as we are fully aware that there are a lot of people involved in this decision, and also that we need to get a lot more information  before we commit to anything, but it's very hard not to get emotionally attached. We keep staring at the photos that we've been left with, and thinking about the future. Having an actual person to look at, makes this whole experience feel more real. It's the awakening that this isn't just an assessment process that we're going through, there's an actual little person, or perhaps in this case, little people, out there, waiting for a home.

It's fair to say that this has all made us quite emotional over the last week or so, we've decided we're getting phantom pregnancy hormones!

We left it a week to talk things through, and then emailed our social worker last week so that she had something waiting from us when she got back from holiday. We told her that we both feel that we could parent these boys and that we would like more information. We got a lovely response back, some more information and also news that she has arranged a meeting next week with the boy's social worker and their foster carers. This is really exciting news, as it demonstrates to us that the agency are very serious about the potential of this match.

Today we had our home assessment visit. Spent the first hour talking about the boys and we learnt a bit more information about their background and their birth parents. We also talked about the meeting next week and what to expect from that.

We then had to get on with the contents of the home study visit. It feels very strange now continuing with the assessment stage of this process, when somehow in our minds, we've moved on to the next stage and we're thinking about our future family. We looked at our child care experience today, we talked through some parenting styles and our social worker asked us to get some more regular child care experience under our belts over the next few weeks - so any parents out there that want to leave their children on our doorsteps - feel free!

So, next week is the first of the big meetings about the boys. If that all goes well, we will then be processing our assessment and our matching assessment all at the same time. They hope to get us to panel in February/March and assess us for approval and matching at the same time. There's a huge amount of work for both us and social services to do in that time, so things may well slip, but there's a potential that we could be a family early in 2012!