Out with it!

Okay, I'm just going to go ahead and spill the beans on the latest, as I'm weary of not having an outlet for it.

Kat and I placed an "inquiry" on three little girls from Colorado - all three sisters - Emily, 10, Nicole, 8, and Kayla, 5. According to their public profile (no longer available online - more on this later) the girls are all developmentally on-target and strongly attached to each other, both of which are extremely good signs.

At any rate, we put in the inquiry on March 31, and on April 14, their social worker contacted us via e-mail, and requested that we send her our home study (which is the official documentation from our social worker as to our eligibility to be adoptive parents). I faxed the home study from Kinko's that afternoon, and we waited a week.

On the 22nd, Kat called the social services office for Montrose County, and inquired in general about county adoption processes. She wasn't able to get a great deal of information regarding timelines and such, but the person she spoke with said that it wouldn't be a bad idea to have our social worker call the girls' social worker to "make an inquiry on our behalf," which she did.

Alarm bells - Elane, the Colorado social worker, told Ann, our social worker, that she (Elane) didn't have our home study.

I got this message at work from Kat in the middle of 3rd period on the 22nd.

Kat then called Elane directly, and spoke with her at length(!) to find out what happened. Upon speaking with her, Elane told Kat that she did indeed have our home study - when Ann called, she "thumbed through" the ones she had and saw "Long Beach, California" up towards the top of our paperwork, and didn't realize right off that it was a couple from Washington State. So, all was okay.

Going back a moment in the chronology, Elane told Ann that she was eliminating all families that already had children. Bonus for us! She also told Ann that she had about 40 inquiries on the girls in total, but not all of them were "serious" - i.e., people who were willing and able to send in qualified home studies.

So, here's where we stand: we appear to be in the running to actually get these girls. Kat and I have analyzed this thing to death, and we can't really figure how anyone else would be better qualified. I mean, the eldest girl, Emily, wants to learn how to play guitar. I mean, come on!!

We don't know, as usual, how long the process is going to take. There are probably certain rules regarding how long the social worker has to wait for home studies from eligible families, then there's most certainly a review process of the home studies received, blah blah blah.

But, some things in our favor:
*we got our home study in the very same day the social worker asked for it (well, it was most likely on her desk the next morning)
*we've had personal, direct contact with the social worker herself
*all three thrive on adult attention and are, in the words of their profile, "eager to learn" (which might just mesh nicely with a teacher and a sign language interpreter)
*Emily's aforementioned desire to learn guitar (as well as piano, which Katrina plays, and I made sure to point out that, in our home, we have a full-size upright piano in our living room and three guitars - two of my leftys and one of Kat's uncle Glen's Gibsons he's left here on seeming permanent loan)

So, more so than I've ever asked for before, please pray for this situation. This is the furthest we've ever gotten in this process, and, from our perspective, the odds look reasonably good.

We're thinking the social worker will want to get things finalized by summer, so the girls can have a little time with their new family before starting school in the fall, so things might just heat up quickly here.

Colorado law doesn't allow for adoptions to be finalized until at least six months after placement, so we'd still have some pins and needles time if the girls did come to live with us, but let's cross that bridge when we get to it.

Pray that these little girls will be placed in the best possible home for them (and, hopefully, that will be in a nice, two-story house on SE 5th Street in Vancouver):
Emily - 10
Nicole - 8
Kayla - 5