THE PLIGHT OF THE BACKUP FAMILY

It has now been about 8 weeks since we first took our names off the matching list. If you recall, we originally agreed to postpone our matching process for six weeks until the county could decide if they were going to remove N and R from their current foster care placement. Gloria told us that they weren’t quite at the point where they had made a decision yet, so we decided to extend our availability as a back up family for an additional two weeks. But now that those two extra weeks are up, Chris and I are ready to say that we are tired of being a back up family. We had already missed out on a child we were expecting to move forward with because we were the second family in line and the child went to the family ahead of us. As it turns out, Gloria did get back to us about a week ago to report that it looks like the county is going to push for permanency (i.e. adoption) with N and R’s current foster family, but that they’d like us to hang on for a little longer to see how it’s going.

ANOTHER PROSPECTIVE MATCH
At this point we were considering being a little pushier with Gloria and telling her that since it looks like the county will likely proceed with adoption for N and R, we would like to start the matching process now rather than waiting until all the papers were signed. But it turned out we didn’t need to do that, since we got a call from Gloria on Tuesday with the news that she has identified another youth that she thinks would be a good match for us. I won’t use his name until we know if he will be placed with us, so I’ll just call him “C”. All I will say for now is that he’s 16 years old and based on what Gloria has told us about his interests and his personality, he sounds like he would fit well with our family. We have a disclosure meeting scheduled for this Monday where we will learn a lot more about him and we can decide if we want to move forward. Details on how that turns out in my next post!

UPDATE WITHOUT MUCH TO SAY

It has been about a month since we took our names off the list for child matching while Social Services decides if they are going to remove N and R from their current foster placement and place them with us. There really hasn't been any progress on this front, but people have been asking us about it so I thought I'd post something so everyone would know we're still in a holding pattern. We did hear from Gloria (after a gentle reminder) who said that things have been pretty quiet at the kids' current foster home but they expect more conflict once school starts, which it just did. Maybe because with school comes nagging about homework, bedtime, etc.? We decided we will wait for another two or three weeks to see how things are coming along but if there's no progress we'll put our names back in for matching with another child - or children. This is really turning into quite a ride, and we don't even have kids yet!