Approved!

We are now officially approved to adopt.  Finally.

For those of you reading this who I don’t know in real life, we were deferred at panel back in February.  I can’t go into the exact reasons here, but let’s just say we dared to disagree with our local authority which is a huge no no, and our social worker failed to ask us something very important to go into our PAR.  Hence we have spent the last few months in limbo, although to be honest our life has been in limbo for the last 9 years.

So more sessions with our social worker, more adoption meetings, more homework, and several months later we attended panel again.  Both feeling very nervous about what had happened back in February and also about what to expect second time around, we sat before panel again but the atmosphere couldn’t have been more different.  Last time we were intimidated, talked down to like we were naughty school children, and there was no warmth or making us feel comfortable.  There was certainly no jolly man, unlike in that BBC or ITV documentary (the name of which escapes me right now), putting us at ease with a warm smile; I think if anybody had dared to smile their faces would have cracked.  However, this time the people were human.  The room had a light atmosphere and there were warm smiles all round which helped us to relax, we even shared a laugh and a joke, and left the room with a positive feeling, albeit still nervous.  5 long minutes later the Panel Chair delivered the decision with a congratulations to us both: we received a unanimous big fat YES.  To say we were, and still are, over the moon is an understatement.

We’re still in limbo, but this is a different limbo – the wait for the right child, which due to our ‘criteria’ will be a long one, but at least we know we’re going to be parents.  After all the miscarriages and the ectopic, I can finally say that with some certainty.