LATEST UPDATE

I realize it’s been over a month since I’ve posted anything, but there hasn't been much to report on. For the most part, Chris and I have just been waiting patiently these past few months for our social worker to give us the good news that he found a youth for us to adopt. Unfortunately that hasn't happened yet, but things have been picking up over the past two weeks.

When we first started this process I think we were under the assumption that there would be a huge number of kids available for adoption immediately and that they would be lined up waiting for us to choose one. After all, we have been looking to adopt a gay teenager, not exactly a demographic in high demand. However we are finding out that it's harder than we thought it would be to find a match. Maybe it's because the parameters of our search have been rather narrow, as we are specifically looking for a boy available for a single placement (no siblings). Regardless, it is taking longer to find a match than we expected, so Chris and I are now considering expanding our search to younger kids outside of Pride and Joy, i.e. not gay, or at least not old enough to identify one way or the other. We’re figuring that we will look for boys age 8-12, still with no siblings. We're not quite ready to take on 2 or more kids at once!

WAITING TO HEAR ABOUT A YOUNGER CHILD
Now that we are looking at younger kids, we did ask our social worker to find out about a boy that a friend of ours told us about. His profile had just been added to the foster care matching website and he did seem like a good match for us, at least from the one-paragraph description of him they posted. He's 10 years old and as far as we know he is not a Pride and Joy candidate but that's fine with us. Our social worker has already contacted his social worker, which is basically how all of our communication has to happen, and we are waiting to get more information so we can decide if we think he would be a good match. That is, if he would even be available to us, since he is located in Los Angeles and the last child from LA we asked about didn't want to move away.

TWO PRIDE AND JOY YOUTHS
In addition to the 10-year-old there have also been two Pride and Joy kids that have been brought to our attention in the past couple of weeks. One was living out of state and was being returned to the foster care system in the Bay Area and needed an emergency placement. Unfortunately there were a number of educational and behavioral issues that Chris and I didn't feel prepared to deal with. We also didn't want to be rushed into an emergency placement since we want to take our time and make sure any possible match will be a good one, so we decided not to proceed with this child. Of course we both felt bad about this but when I called the social worker the next day I was told that there was another family who wanted to take him in, so it seemed the situation was going to work out for everyone. As for the second youth, our social worker is still waiting to get more information about him. Hopefully we'll be hearing about him this week, but there's not much we can do other than wait patiently. I'll be sure to post any updates!