First Contact

Yesterday marks the first time we were contacted by a recruiter (basically contracted social workers) for a child we did not know about. This is a good thing in a general sense; we wanted to get our name out there so that this exact thing could happen. There is a six month old girl available in Oregon, and this woman thought of us. The tricky thing is that the baby's birth parents and siblings/half-siblings (already adopted separately) have or show evidence of various health concerns that are difficult, if not impossible, to diagnose in a 6 month old baby.

So what happens is that first the recruiter gave us a small sampling of the information she had in her initial email. We replied that we were interested in more info, and she gave us the rest of what she had. But she's just a recruiter; so this afternoon (after consulting a few people) we decided to agree to submitting our home study to the baby's social worker. That worker will give us just a little bit more information, and then when they're done waiting for home study submissions they'll choose three or so (depends on the state) as finalists who will get a lot more information. The baby will be going through formal developmental evaluations "in August" (meaning 3 weeks or 7, we don't know) to determine if she needs any diagnoses or meds or whatever. At that point, if we're still in the running, we'll be able to know the results of that evaluation... I think. We can back out at any time... I think they're less strict about visitations and whatnot when the child is younger, so that's in our favor... especially since she's across the country... but again, depends on the state.

That's what's up right now. We're walking the balance of wanting to hope but not allowing it because there's so many variables and enough concerns to weigh in the situation, but quite a few things in its favor that we hadn't expected to open to us. Please pump up the prayer volume while we're "proceeding with extreme caution", both emotionally and with the actual paperwork and decision making.