Match Staffing and Meeting Our Kiddo!!!

As you can tell by the title of this blog MANY things have happened in the course of the last few weeks.  I've been too busy to post until now, and this post is serving two purposes:  it's being informational for those of you who read but are not on my Facebook, and it's being therapeutic for me.  For those of you who have already seen all of this on Facebook, just stop reading here unless you want a repeat of everything I've been randomly posting when I had a second or two to spare.  :-)

My last blog entry mentions waiting to see if Mama S and I could get a family worker in order to be able to get the Child Study on the 16 year old we inquired about.  As I have said before and will continue to say again, the people who are working with us on our adoption are INCREDIBLE!  The supervisor and the worker who did our Homestudy (we'll call her our godsend for purposes of this blog) decided that our godsend would be our "family worker" for the rest of the process with this kiddo.  We. Are. Thrilled!  Not only does she have a good handle on who we are and all that other good stuff, but she also KNOWS her stuff and we trust her judgement completely.  All of this being said, we were scheduled for our Match Staffing before even getting set up with our godsend to go over the Child Study.  We have since gone over the Child Study, and we both felt it would be appropriate to move forward.  That being said, our Match Staffing will be taking place some time on Wednesday!!!  Mama S and I both thought we had to be present for it, but instead we can stay home (work really) and have our anxiety attacks from the comfort of our own place of employment.  Instead, our godsend will be representing us to the Match committee.  From what I've gathered, the committee is made up of the kiddo's workers (2 that I know of), and a number of other important people.  We will hopefully know the same day what their decision is, as they may take longer that the set meeting time to determine if we're a good match (lots of factors play into that).

All this Match Staffing business is exciting and stressful and amazing and all that rolled into one, but couple that with the fact that we have been invited to an adoption event where we get to MEET THE KIDDO, and well, you have both of us pretty wild eyed.  One of the workers involved with our kiddo invited us to an adoption event this coming weekend. We were told that the kiddo would be in attendance and that it would be a good opportunity to interact with her.  The only catch?  We can't tell her we were matched with her, as she won't find out until after we receive "Full Disclosure" roughly a week after our Match Staffing.  This means that we will get pretty much all her information and have a short period of time (as in days) to review it all and decide if we still want to move forward with the process.  After we say "yes", they tell her that a family is interested in her and give her time for it to sink in.  From there, we shall see what happens, but we're hopeful that all will go smoothly and we will be this much closer to being her parents.  :-)

The rest of the process will still take time.  Months and months to be realistic, but at least she may get a family out of the deal and we may get a daughter.  I just hope that she is placed with the right family, even if it isn't us (though we both really want it to be!) and that she can be loved for who she is.  All I'll say is this, she's an INCREDIBLE girl who has some potential to do amazing things, and hopefully we can be the family who gets to watch her do nothing but succeed.