When we started our adoption we selected the criteria we were willing to accept as a placement. Our request was, boy or girl, ages 0-4, any race. When we said "any race" we really meant that, but for some reason it was a kinda hard concept for some people at our agency to understand. I am going to SKIM over that subject & keep going, if you have questions about THAT please feel free to message me. The way the matching went was, our matching specialist got a "broadcast" of a child that was looking for a family, she then sent it on to me if she felt it was a match, to which I replied yes or no. If it was a "yes" she sent in our Homestudy for consideration. During the following 8 months we were submitted for 30+ children, only 4 of which were girls. Out of all of those submissions we had one RAS meeting, I consider this the semi-finals of adoption. A RAS is when the submitted families are narrowed down to the top 4, your matching specialist, or case worker, then goes to a meeting along with workers for the other 3 families & the child. During this meeting one family is chosen & the other 3 go back to the drawing board. Our first RAS meeting was about 5 months in, and we weren't selected. Though I was disappointed I really felt OK with the decision. In October of 2008 we got a phone call that we were selected to go into a RAS, for a little boy we had submitted for in MAY! I immediately went to my email (where I had saved every single broadcast), & looked up the little boy we were fighting for. Because the child was located outside of our region (about 6 hours away), our worker would not be able to attend in person, instead she would be fighting for us, on speaker phone. She asked me to answer some final questions that may come up in the meeting as well as write a short letter stating what we could do to help this child transition (he was speaking mainly Spanish, which we do not). The RAS was scheduled for the following Tuesday at 2:30, she said she would call as soon as the meeting was over, usually 1-2 hours. Well to say the least I didn't let my phone leave my side. I stared at it intensely. At one point I did have to actually leave to pick my nephew up from school. While waiting in the car rider line I hear the familiar ding of my voice mail. I was in shock, it never rang, i snatched it up & immediately checked my voice mail. It was our matching specialist. She said she couldn't believe I didn't answer, but to call her back ASAP, we were selected & it was a match! I knew right away this was our son. Though we had to wait for his file to come in before it was official, we were over the moon. It was October 30th when his complete file came in, we rushed down the same day & read it cover to cover. Once we read the whole file we were ready to continue & schedule our in person visits. Our first meeting was the 2nd weekend in November. We would be leaving Houston on Friday morning, for the 6 hour drive to meet our son. To make matters worse, I was car sick the entire 6 hours, we were late & I was sick while our son was waiting. The photo above was taken an hour after we arrived in town, in the drive way of his foster mothers home, we look happy, but he was terrified. Five minutes earlier I had to hold him down in the car seat while my husband strapped him in. I sat in the back seat with him & took pictures with my phone to make him happy. This is our first photo together. That first night we were allowed to take him to dinner & just out to spend some time together. We took him to Target, to pick out a toy. I had brought a Spanish/English dictionary with us, but asking people walking by proved to be the most useful form of translation. After that we went to McDonalds to eat together. We had to take him home that first night, but Saturday night he got to stay with us at the hotel. We spent the next afternoon at the zoo, had lunch & shopped a bit. We had NOTHING for him & we didn't expect his foster family to provide anything. After all this was our son & providing for him was our job, the subsidy that foster families receives is barely enough to feed them, much less provide a whole wardrobe & room full of toys. Leaving our son that first week was unbearable. We had to go home without him, in hopes of bringing him home the following weekend. The following weekend we went down Friday night & scheduled to leave with him Sunday morning. As an adoptive parent you miss so much. We missed our sons first 2 birthdays, his first words, steps & teeth. More than anything in that whole process I was grateful my son had a foster family that taught him to love for the first 2 years of his life. I think often adoptive families forget these people, but the pain his foster mother felt giving him up is very real to me. I know she wanted to keep him very badly, but as a single mother she felt he deserved a father & she couldn't give him that. I am so grateful to her for what she did for our son, she took photos at his birthdays, at the park and of him as a baby. These are the only things I have for the first 2 years of his life and they are the most precious things to us. I do still send photos & keep in contact with some of his foster family, its the least we can do! After we got home with our baby boy, life as we knew it was turned upside down!
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