Starting the paperwork.

So, our interview went really well! It was less like a job interview and more like a "getting to know us" interview. We were asked about our families, how we met, our lives in general. Turns out, being boring people (i.e. no arrests, no mental health issues, etc.) is a good thing for adoption. Who knew?! We went over some of the things in our application about what we are looking for in terms of our child. We're pretty open to anything, so I think that we'll be adopting fairly quickly. Apparently, they occasionally get children who are in the toddler range that are legally available for adoption, as well as sibling groups (like a 3 year old and a 1 year old), which we said we'd be happy with, too. I think that's pretty rare, but it's still an exciting prospect!

When adopting domestically, we are generally talking about adopting a newborn, and sometimes these babies come from less than ideal circumstances. In a perfect world, we'd get a perfect, healthy baby. But since this isn't a perfect world, we are willing to consider babies who may or may not be perfectly healthy and whole. As I've mentioned previously, you have to be brutally honest with yourself about your own limitations, and you absolutely cannot go into something like this looking for a charity case. But our social worker told us that they contact us and discuss the specific situation before they put us into the pile to be considered. It's win-win all around that way. We can opt out of any situation we're uncomfortable with, and they have the best chance of placing a child with a family that will love and support it no matter the bumps in the road.

All in all, we're super excited about the upcoming months. The woman we met with, (I've been calling her our social worker, but really she's the director of domestic adoptions at Barker), Cecilia, cautioned us that most families get a placement sometime in their second year. Could be month 13, could be month 20. You just never know. But given our lack of selection criteria for our potential baby, I'm pretty confident that we'll be parents in the next 12 months or less. I'm prepared to wait longer, but I think fortune will smile upon us here. And, at any rate, it's nice to have something tangible to do, even if it is just paperwork.

Last year was the hardest, saddest year of my life. This year is going to be one of the happiest.