Adopting J

We found out about J back at the beginning of November when we went to a waiting children mixer where loads of children who were in foster care and waiting for forever families were showcased. Daniel and I felt an instant connection with him and talked to all of the staff members who were there that evening about him. We asked our caseworker, who was there that evening, to send us his CSI (Child Study Inventory). We received it the following week and devoured it. His caseworker was on vacation but as soon as she was back to work we called to let her know we were interested.

The next step was having his caseworker and ours come out to the house to do an "interview" - basically discussing him with us and how we might handle certain situations that might arise with him. We had to wait while other interested families were interviewed and a matching conference was set up

On Thursday, Dec. 9, we got the call at 4:45 that we matched with J! I had been a nervous wreck all afternoon but Amira did a fabulous job of entertaining me. Daniel had been waiting for me to call and let him know when I heard something so by the time he arrived home at 4:30 he was convinced that I hadn't called because I had gotten bad news and was crying. He had even planned to get up early the next morning and remove J's bed from his room before I got up so I wouldn't have to deal with it - what a wonderful husband I have!

On Friday we got another call from J's caseworker saying we needed to decide how much subsidy we wanted to ask for to cover the cost of having him in our home. We have never done that before so we ended up making a bit of a stab in the dark. We can go back and ask for more if we need to but we have to have some amount of subsidy when he arrives. If we didn't ask for subsidy before he is adopted then we wouldn't be able to go back and ask for it later if we found out we needed it. We also picked up half of his file to start reading that half while the adoption supervisor finishes reading the second half.

Over the weekend we spent a few hours reading through the half of J's file that we have - no surprises in it thankfully. And today, after Jacob's final electricity class, he and Daniel will be stopping to pick up the rest of J's file so we can finish reading it. His caseworker will be coming out on Wednesday to have us sign off on his file and to pick up a letter and gift from us to him. We are planning to have our first visit with him on Dec. 26th.