[slikmom]

I am an adoptive mother of three children. We live in NY and the "blue book" aka New York's Waiting Children photolistings were something my husband and I eagerly checked every two weeks when the new pages came with updates. After we were certified on our homestudy, we searched through the NY listings and those available on the internet. Once we had good thoughts on a child or set of children, we contacted our own case worker. She would send our homestudy where it needed to go. The problem for us is that we never heard back from anybody out of state.. or anybody in state for that matter. We found our children because their case worker was chatting with our case worker and asked if she knew of anybody who might be interested in a sibling group of three. Lucky for us! When I went to the library to check the photolisting, there was a note on it that the children were on hold. The children had been on hold, and those potential adoptive parents had backed out. The book had never been updated. I wonder how many children are waiting because of that mistake. And ultimately the mistake is the library's mistake because they missed the note that the children were again available.
In our family's case, the photolistings were a good resource for the kinds of children and behaviors our there, but we didn't find any success in locating children from any of them.
Heather Cieslik