In many ways, family finding was the hardest part of our adoption story so far.
We read so many profiles of different children and groups of siblings, all with their own sad story.
We made one rather important decision quite early though - we wanted to adopt two children, preferably boys. We were so happy to have both agreed on this decision, although we had been talking about it for a while.
We inquired, through our social worker, about a couple of sets of siblings. It was so hard looking at a picture and reading a profile, and then trying to decide if these ‘strangers’ could possibly be our children.
I just wanted to buy a bigger house and adopt them all!!!!
This was a very frustrating time, as we seem to be getting little feedback from the social workers of the children that we enquired about.
Then, one day, we had a call from our social worker. She had been contacted by a local authority social worker who had seen our profile and had forwarded a profile of two little brothers.
We read their details and looked at their picture. We felt an instant connection. They actually look a little bit like us.
A meeting was arranged with their social worker at our house. We were nervous, but we had a good feeling about this. The boys’ social worker showed us a small video clip of the boys playing football. To see them walking and running and talking just confirmed what we were already feeling. We agreed to leave it for a few days and then decide whether we wanted to take it any further.
Janet was keen straight away, although my natural, prudent approach made me a little bit wary. The more detailed file on the boys just added to my worries. Their difficult start in life was hard to read, but was like so many of the profiles that we had read.
We found out a few days later that the boys’ social worker was keen to place the boys with us and we accepted!!!!! How excited were we by this! All my worries disappeared and we began to focus on our future family.
Of course the timing was not good as Christmas was fast approaching, among other factors, our Matching Panel was set for January.