Friday 18 January 2013

We've heard a lot about you

 Introductions went quite smoothly where we first met him, then over the next few days played a bigger and bigger role in his daily routine as procedure dictates. This culminates with foster carers dropping him off at our house one day when we look after him all day, give him dinner, occupy him and finally get him ready for bed then to take him home to FC's and put him straight to bed there. Next day we're there for him waking and pick him up in his nightwear to drive back to our's and do the full day with him from breakfast, getting him ready, spending the day with him through lunch, nap, dinner and bedtime routine before taking him back again. Then next morning it's FC who gets him up before we arrive to meet her and social workers and take him home to our's for good. Yes, so he sees us for almost two whole days then is back with foster carer so he thinks we only had him as he was on holiday.....

On the first meeting with him: we'd seen plenty of photos of him and heard so much about him, probably as much as there is to know about him at this early stage in his life, but there is nothing that could prepare us for the moment we went into FC's house and he appeared from round the corner. There he was, in 3D flesh more lovely than he looked in his pics (and believe me, that's saying something). I don't know, maybe it's his personality that you see in the flesh, but our Paddington there, the boy we've been planning our future with as part of our family, right in front of us, was the most amazing sight I'd ever witnessed.

Tuesday 15 January 2013

Forgive me,  it's been about 9 months since my last update of this blog

It's difficult to keep a blog going when it's about something like this when there are such long periods of nothing happening. Then you're so happy when something does happen you're buzzing too much to update

So, quick update. We had our approval panel back at the end of July which we got through. This was followed by the highs and lows of trying to get a match. A couple of aborted suggestions, largely through questionable decision-making from social services. These were a 3 year old boy and a little girl who was 2, both of whom were lovely little kids (from the information we had, at least). An older boy of 4 was suggested but he turned out to be apparently unsuitable for various reasons, though we didn't end up seeing any real details on him. It was during this time we decided we'd prefer a child at the ounger end of our range, 2.5 to 5, and another little boy was suggested as a possible match who was actually not even two.I know it's difficult to not be swayed by the picture on the report, but he is the cutest little thing. We talked about him between ourselves and decided he would actually be a great match so went ahead with the process to adopt him. We got through matching panel for him so we had a lot of work to do round the house to make the place suitable for a toddler. To be honest, that wasn't radically different to what we needed for a kid a year or so older.



And that was the next part: progression towards matching with this new Paddington.