[Waiting4Skip]

Just wondering if you've heard anything yet!

[wenrl]

Hi Everyone,

I haven't heard a single thing about a match or not yet. I have been waiting to respond, because we have done absolutely everything we could and are getting progressively more anxious and cranky everyday. That wasn't exactly the emotion I wanted to share, but oh well...

We are possibly among the calmest easiest going people on the planet. We never lose our tempers or get snippy with each other or strangers, but this adoption experience is really starting to wear on us. We are now in the stage we thought we would never experience in which we wonder what if something is wrong with us.

Although we have our hearts set on one particular child, we let our homestudy go in for another great kid could who may also be a good match for us. We had a little bit of guilt about that, because we feel pretty loyal to the first child, but are very interested in the second too. We just can't assume that either one of them will be the right match and so have applied for both.

We are really upset with the system right now, because social worker 1 is unavailable to tell us if a decision has been made and our own social worker has been unavailable for the past two weeks to tell us if our homestudy was sent for the second. All of this after the first social worker had to get our homestudy twice because it was lost the first time. So, we're sending a copy of our homestudy ourselves to the second child's worker and hoping that will be official enough.

We are so confused right now also, because on the one hand, we keep hearing that there are so many kids in need of homes and on the other we have been waiting for a year and feel like we have to fight to get our homestudy looked at. From our perspective it FEELS like there are too many parents hoping to adopt from the foster care system. We know how painful waiting feels for us and are imagining what it feels like for the children. We want to provide a safe loving home to a girl of any race or background under ten years old. We didn't know this was such a tall request when we started or we would have began preparing for adoption even sooner.

My partner made a good comment about our frustration. She believes that when we are matched, it will feel like the best miracle ever, because of all the frustration we have been through in the waiting. In the meantime I am feeling more critical of my shortcomings and asking myself if it matters that we rent instead of own a home, if I don't make enough money, volunteer enough time or have enough experience with children. I hate it when people throw their own pitty parties, but it's tough to stay positive when feeling ignored and overlooked.

Has anyone else felt this way and how did you deal with it?

[wenrl]

I should probably start a new thread with this question, but since this is where I started and everyone has given such great support and advice, this is where I will continue unless nobody responds.

First, I'll answer my original question from my perspective for anyone who wants to know... the answer to "what kind of timeline?" is there is absolutely no way to know. As mentioned, we have applied for two seperate girls and here is the update. It has been four months since we applied for the first and to our knowledge, no decision has been made officially, but her social worker let us know last week that she will not be reading our homestudy, because we are out of state. We are disappointed, but grateful that she has contacted us at all. As for the second, our social worker took three weeks to send out our homestudy and in the meantime, this child's worker made a decision and had a disclosure meeting.

We found this out today after contacting the child's worker and best of all, she also told us that she called our worker and told her that she had already made a decision. However, our worker NEVER called us.

So, here is the new question... I know that workers are busy and I know that everyone who is waiting is frustrated, but we have been waiting for over a year and our worker hasn't sent out our homestudy, to our knowledge, ever without us calling and emailing her at least 4 times. We really need our homestudy updated and have called her and emailed her several times in the past two months about this without her saying "boo" to us. Also, we know that she never contacted our references, but in our homestudy, she wrote that our references were good. We have only asked her to send it twice and as mentioned, the second time she waited so long the worker made a choice before she saw it. We do not know what to do about this. Do we complain? Can we request someone else? Is this normal state worker performance?

We really want to adopt an older child through the state, but the way things are going, it seems like it will never happen, especially if our worker is unable to send out a homestudy on time or communicate with us and pass on information.

Any advice?