Week 11 diary

0 - 200 mph in less than three weeks!! At last, something to report on the adoption and things have suddenly got a lot more exciting!

It all started with my phone call to Susan our social worker. Yes, I couldn't resist calling her in the end. I was sat at work one afternoon, everyone was out and it was all quiet. I got to thinking that maybe I could make that call - I could just ring her and wish her Happy New Year perhaps.

Then I thought not. Then I thought, well, Susan won't be there anyway, so if I call I can just leave a message to say hello. So, I made the call. By some miracle or fate, Susan picked the phone up.

I said "Hi Susan, its Melanie, how are you" and she just started laughing. She explained that she'd just been thinking about us and was going to call us next week 'when she had a bit more information'.

At those words, I started to feel a little excited. More information about what?! She said that now I'd called she'd have to tell me everything. Now I was a lot excited!

It turned out that we had been approached about a 3 year old little boy and she was awaiting a little more information, but wanted to come and see us the following week. She was awaiting the Form E from his social worker, and wanted to get this to bring along for us to look at. Well, I put the phone down and I was really, really excited. I don't know, but somehow something sounded good. I rang Tim at work - he was just as excited too.

Well, the next week came. Susan came to visit and bought along the Form E. She gave us some additional information on him that his social worker had told her over the phone. There were some legal issues still to be resolved, but they didn't foresee any problems with these at all.

As soon as Susan had gone, we again, as before, resisted temptation to tear open the envelope and read the form there and then. We sat and had something to eat, opened a bottle of wine, then sat down to read. It was really strange - for the first time, everything seemed to read right. At the end, we just looked at one another and said to each other "This could be the one!". It's the strangest feeling, but something just clicked and told us this could be right for us.

Susan had already said for us to think about it and just let us know in our own time. Well, I was on the phone to her the following day to tell her we were very, very interested. Susan said she wasn't surprised and again, this felt really good to us that she also seemed as enthusiastic as we did.

Susan said she would get in touch with the little boy's social worker and arrange for her to visit with us. We're now waiting for that meeting next week, and we're a mixture of being very excited and a couple of bags of nerves.

We're approaching it almost like it's an interview. Will they like us? How about if we say the wrong thing! We can't even find any questions that we'd like to ask, so we're going to have to really rack our brains to think of something!!

We still can't believe that just three weeks ago nothing was happening - and now all this has happened just out of the blue. It just goes to show how unpredictable the adoption process is.

Of course, this time we've got all the right feelings about this little one, and it's really strange that although we tell ourselves that its very early in the process and we shouldn't get too carried away, that's exactly what we're doing. Even Tim, who is the one who normally grounds me, is already talking about it a lot more than me - which is saying something!!

So there we are - can you believe it? At last, this adoption diary is actually an adoption diary - well, that's how its looking at the moment - you can never count your chickens!

Anyway, we shall now revert to our old two-week diary writing, so hopefully in two weeks we'll have a little bit more to tell!!