DAY 1

“So there is news, but it is complicated – but then it always is!”

These were the words of our social worker as she began to tell us about a potential match they had identified for us. Words spoken 6 months after we received the news of our approval as prospective adopters. Redacted CPR.

DAY 6 – whole family meeting with baby’s social worker and our ASW at ours.

DAY 14 – a chance chemistry meeting after a meeting between ourselves, baby’s social worker, our social worker and baby’s foster carers.

DAY 20 – Court decision re Foster to Adopt

DAY 21 – Planning Introductions and my first cuddle. Present: Chair, baby’s two social workers, foster carers, foster carers social worker, our social worker and us. Ooh and baby – not always the case, but practicalities necessitated it.

Introductions and Coming Home, Contact and Court

Key ‘Introductions’ words: Exciting, intense, exhausting, lots of information, busy, back and forth, lots of people involved, lots of driving, closely planned, bonding time just the three of us: playing, getting to know you, learning, revelling…

DAY 34 – Introductions begin – see separate post

DAY 43 / Placement DAY – Baby comes home. Paperwork. Foster Carers pop by for first few days.

Days since placement 4 – We’re on our own! Registering with doctors, health visitors (NOTE: with the Strengthening Families team not your local health visiting team), dentists…

DSP 7 – Contact – see separate post

DSP 12 – Contact cancelled

DSP 13 – Court Decision re Placement Order

Key ‘Early Days’ words/notes: At home, time and space. Timing the rare little trip out with sleep time, following routine, growing confidence, guarded normality with the other children, social worker visits, lots of time just the three of us, cuddles and more revelling, joy and amazement, togetherness, memory making, guarding baby’s normal as much as possible, help from supporters to keep life going. Ups and downs; highs and lows: as naps or bottles were slightly mistimed or spot on; as weaning led to a constant mix of ‘successes’ and ‘failures’; as meetings pushed rhythms out of whack or a day just worked; as baby’s happy times coincided with the older children needing some time with us or just as baby went through her own ups and downs and we tried to understand. Quite a high level of social worker visits(at least weekly stat visits – but generally more), some keeping in touch with foster carers.

DSP 19: Phone consultation with the Medical Adviser – this was really pleasant and gave me a chance to ask a question regarding something that had come up in a recent health visitor report. There was some confusion over which tests had been done and needed to be done, and what information I should or shouldn’t have – but we got there!

DSP 20: Contact

DSP 25: CLA review – Child Looked After review meeting. Present: Baby’s IRO, baby’s social workers (2 because she was still in foster to adopt) and our social worker. The meeting was at our home and we had met everyone before which was nice. The health visitor wasn’t there as I had only just been able to track the right team down! This meeting was chaired by baby’s IRO and reviewed how baby was doing in a number of areas and where we were in the process regarding matching panel, contacts, meeting birth family etc. The IRO’s knowledge of the whole birth family really shone through making sure the right questions were asked and that all the various needs were balanced.

The statutory requirements for CLA review meetings are that they happen within every 6 months but within 28 days when there is a change in placement. For us this has so far translated into 2 CLA meetings – one just after the initial placement with us – a foster to adopt placement; and one after our matching panel when it became an adoptive placement. We have one further CLA review meeting pencilled in for August (6 months after the most recent one) which will only go ahead if the Adoption Order has NOT come through.

DSP 25: Baby meets a grandparent! Grandpa was coming up to collect some Christmas presents and was able to stay with a friend of ours as it was quite early to have someone new stay with us. He was very respectful and kept his distance – no cuddles and always waiting to be reached out to – but it was really lovely to start integrating baby into the wider family.

DSP 28: Final Contact cancelled last minute. Find out more in my post on Contact, but this was definitely a low point!

DSP 40: A very different sort of Christmas! Our usual Christmas Day is to drive for 5 hours, followed by a week staying with family and being very busy. This year was completely different. It was wonderful to celebrate baby’s first Christmas with her and to make some at home Christmas traditions together – including a massive real Christmas tree.

At this point we did venture out and about a little more – going on a lovely New Year’s Eve walk in the woods with some friends and afterwards to a cafe, continuing our tradition of 10 years or so by meeting up with close family friends for a day just before Christmas and a trip to big brother’s school play. Baby even had her first trip into Asda itself – compared to the usual sit in the car for click and collect – as we had a prescription to pick up.

Main threads during this stage: An odd mixture of a bit more back to normal – a more confident sense of rhythm in our days and routines, a pause on contacts, fewer social worker visits due to Christmas holidays, and getting out a little more – and the ‘un-normality’ of Christmas – and a very different one at that – and school holidays etc.

Back in May in the period immediately following Approval I compared the adoption process to a play in various acts.

Act 1 told two separate stories. Firstly – the story of a child, their birth family; and the social workers and courts involved in deciding what was best for this unique and special individual. And secondly the story of a couple going through the process of being approved to be adoptive parents. Both of these stories ended Act 1 at the same point – heading towards adoption – only to diverge again in Act 2. Although now swimming in the same pool these hitherto separate stories still had to wend their way towards each other through due process and good old fashioned patience. And finally the curtains fell on Act 2 – the inevitability of the intertwining of these stories crystal clear to the audience, but still tantalisingly outside the experience or knowledge of the principle actors.

And now the orchestra has started to play again, the audience have retaken their seats and the curtain rises on Act 3 in an atmosphere of delightful anticipation. The scene is set in the house of the prospective adopters. ‘Mum’ is knitting in the baby’s room with a sense of excitement that she has no foundation for other than the more hopeful / expectant tone of their last meeting with their social worker and… ? well let’s call it intuition (always easy with hindsight!). The doorbell goes and Mum heads down the stairs while Dad goes to the door. Hot drinks are initiated, small talk performed…. and then – off the usual script – the social worker asks: “Are you expecting anyone home soon?” “No”, she is assured, in fact there are after school clubs etc so we have a good amount of time available…And so it is that seated in their usual seats in the sitting room the prospective adopters finally hear the words they have been hoping for: “So there is news….. ” and the audience breathe a sigh of relief as the two stories they have followed for two Acts now collide for the very first time.

A change of pace can take a while to settle into and life post approval has very much been a question of re-pacing myself. I had been warned of this, but I had also heard of the rare occasions where a match is virtually ready and waiting and it was a lot more fun preparing for that eventuality than the former.

During Stage 2 and the run up to Panel our adoption journey was quite equal to the task of keeping up with the the fast pace of work and family life. Weekly assessment meetings over a couple of months, followed by a lunch for our supporters to meet our AW; Day 4 Training and wanting to be as ‘new arrival ready’ as possible ensured that our ‘Adoption Busy’ matched our ‘Normal Life Busy’ stride for stride.

Post approval however, the former running partners need to be happy to fall out of stride with each other for a while.

Normal life races on in its usual hectic way rightly refusing to be put on hold. The year moves relentlessly on into territory that had held the potential to be shared with our new arrival, while the adoption jogs on slowly behind.

But this too is just a stage and a very important one at that. A vital leg of the race which is – like all parenting – a marathon and not a sprint. When our new arrival has been with us for 4, 10, 24…. years I am sure that I will look back on this season of waiting with great fondness – because it brought us our child. Would I trade them for another child just because they were ‘ready for collection’ a month or two earlier – not in a million years!

Life in the Green Room is an analogy carried through from my two previous posts comparing the adoption journey to a play and seeing this matching stage as a period of waiting back stage before being called back into the action in due course.

The good news is that we are by no means left completely uninformed or unlooked after as we wait back stage.

We have an Adoption Support Worker (ASW) who we have met once now – and who will come out and see us about once a month whatever the news (or lack thereof) to build relationship with us and reassure us that we haven’t been forgotten. In addition we are now within a network of events and groups designed to support us.

But it is still a waiting game. A ‘game’ that seems to vary from day to day and week to week in its level of difficulty – unless of course it is my competency at ‘playing’ it that is fluctuating!

Some days I find myself jumping whenever the phone goes: “might this be THE call that introduces us to our new child?” and other days I don’t.

Some days the fact that we are waiting pops into my mind 10 times a minute, on other days it is much less.

Some days the waiting seems to physically hurt, or at least physically sit with me in the pit of my stomach and other days it rests more gently in the edge of my consciousness.

But every day life goes on – not quite as usual as there are books to read, training notes to summarise / absorb, emails and invitations to training days and support groups to process and daydreams to be had – but pretty much in the same way as it always has done.

Emotionally it is comparable to a tide coming in and going out – with my impatience / anxiety being the waves reaching further and further up the beach.

At high tide the waiting seems to engulf me and leave little space for anything else and making it hard to imagine that such heightened expectation will ever subside.

Thankfully though it always does. Imperceptibly at first and without any obvious prompting the tide slowly goes out and there is space once again for pressing on with the here and now and preparing for the longed for, daunting, exciting unknown ahead.

Last week was definitely a high tide week for me, this week – well if not low tide it’s at least low-ER! And who knows what tomorrow will bring!

If we imagine Act 1 as two stories coming to two separate, but equally climatic points – Act 2 takes us back to the vital, but more prosaic foothills of paperwork and meetings.

If the curtain falls on Act 1 as two reports are stamped APPROVED – one identifying us as prospective adopters and one identifying our child as a child to be placed for adoption – Act 2 opens with those reports getting ‘lost’ in two huge and very separate piles of similar reports on two busy, but very separate desks.

But what next? Well as prospective adopters we don’t really appear in Act 2 – at least not in person – but I think I can give you a general feel for who is involved and where the action takes place.

Meet the cast

CSW – The Child’s Social Worker 
Each child for whom we are a potential match will have a social worker. They are the experts on the child and the birth family.

N.B. Children who have been removed from their birth families and placed in Foster Care are referred to as a Child Looked After (CLA) and they will have a Child Permanence Report or CPR.

FF – The Family Finder
The FF is the expert on matching the right child with the right PAs (Prospective Adopters). There are three to cover the north, south and west of the county.

ASW – Adoption Support Workers (from within the Adoption Support Team)
Social workers who work with PAs through the matching process and beyond. They are the experts on the PAs. (N.B. We have previously been under the Assessment Team.)

IRO – The Independent Reviewing Officer
The IRO is the expert in being independent (!) and in the big picture. IROs are able to look at the case as a whole from a slightly different vantage point. The IRO also works for the council, but is in a different team and under different management to the CSW and the ASW. They often have a good grasp of the wider situation of the birth family, contact arrangements between siblings etc.

The Courts
The courts are the experts in the law and the only ones with the power to remove children from their families*. It is the court who will have placed each CLA in foster care in the first place (under an Interim Care Order / Care Order) and who will then decide on whether to rehabilitate them back into their birth family or to issue a placement order either for special guardianship with a family member, or for foster to adopt or adoption.

*The Police do have powers to remove children in emergencies (under a Police Protection Order) – but it is the court who then take the case forward.

See where the action takes place

(PP): Permanency Panel
At which the court decide on the plan for the CLA

TMs: Tracking Meetings
At Tracking Meetings a child’s case is looked at and the various possible outcomes for them are discussed and planned for.

In most cases the CLAs being discussed will already be have a Placement Order (PO) – either for adoption or foster to adopt. There are others who are known as SBPAs – should be placed for adoption – where there is a clear plan for adoption, but the PO has not yet been issued by the courts.

Alternatively – there may still a chance of rehabilitation – the child returning to their birth mother – if so those involved will plan for both scenarios as they wait for the court’s decision – this is called twin tracking. If there is a chance of a family member coming forward or being deemed suitable it becomes triple tracking!

As a child’s case is discussed at a tracking meeting PAs will be mentioned in connection with them where appropriate – their PARs (Prospective Adopters Reports) will be passed on to the CSW to be discussed at a matching meeting.

MM: Matching Meetings
At the first matching meeting – MM 1 – the CSW and the FF will meet and make a decision on whether to proceed with any of the potential matches offered at the tracking meeting. If a good match is felt to have identified they will then contact the relevant ASW and discuss it with them – MM2.

Contacting the PAs (our only appearance on stage in Act 2!)
If the ASW also supports the match they will get in touch with the PA with some initial information about the CLA, which if positively received will be followed by the CPR.

The PAs will be given a chance to read the CPR and then to meet with their ASW. The following stage will be a time for lots of questions and processing of information. Where appropriate PAs may meet with the child’s Foster Carer and other professionals involved in their care – possibly a medical adviser or health visitor… Plans for ongoing contact with siblings will be discussed where relevant, as will any plans for a one off meeting with the birth parents.

Next comes Matching Meeting 3 – MM3
This is a meeting between professionals  to check that every aspect has been covered before the match goes to a matching panel – MP.

Also in the run up to the MP the PAs will prepare an Introductions Book and may have a Chemistry Meeting with the child.

MP – Matching Panel
This is the first official meeting that the PAs attend after their Adoption Panel and is a similar format/setting. As before a recommendation will be made to the ADM (Agency Decision Maker) who will then decide whether or not to support that recommendation.

And then we really are nearly there! Roll on Act 3.

So what is life like once the ‘if’ of adoption is almost totally replaced by the ‘when’?

In one word….

Strange!

Let’s start with the technicalities.

Having been recommended by the Adoption Panel and having had that recommendation accepted by the Agency Decision Maker we are now Approved Prospective Adopters for Cumbria County Council.

The next stage is called the Matching Stage. As approved prospective adopters we are now eligible to be matched with a child aged 0-2 for whom the plan is either adoption or foster to adopt.

And if this sounds exciting – it is! If this sounds as though we are getting pretty close to being able to welcome a child into our family – we are! We’re on the mailing list, we’re welcome at support meetings, we’ve got all sorts of dates in our diaries.. In short -the activity levels are all systems

but….as far as we are concerned – all that GO, all that action is happening behind the scenes.

Or more accurately, it is our family who have come to the point in the script directing us to…

and who are now back in the green room waiting for our call as a different thread of the story plays out under the spotlight.

In my next post I lay out the sorts of things that might be going on out there – but for now I want to linger on life back stage.

Which brings me back to that word STRANGE. In one sense it is life as normal – work, school, home, family, food shopping, plans for half term – there are plenty of threads of our family’s story still going on! And yet there is a readiness and a getting ready for a really amazing, wonderful, big, daunting, exciting. life changing moment that could happen at any moment. COULD happen, but may not for months or even years.

Going through the assessment in Stage 2 was like working through a well thumbed script. This would happen, and then that would happen and than we would be do this. It was all heading in a predictable fashion to a denouement – the final scene of Act 1 – Panel. Tension mounted as we waited to see how that scene was going to play out – we weren’t provided with that part of the script in advance! – and then jubilant celebration as the curtain dropped on our delighted approval.

Now here we are in the green room – no script, no guarantees, no time scale. We are living in the readiness of a “5 minutes to curtain” call, and yet without the 5 minutes to count down and with only a very vague script to prepare for Act 3 with.

And meanwhile the curtain is back up – Act 2 is underway.

But before we move on, I want to linger on one more element of Act 1 – after all it’s not as though Act 2 can’t manage without us for a bit!

You see I have spoken about Act 1 as though ours was the only story being told, as though each and every scene was about us.But for all the drama of our scenes in Act 1, ours was not the only story being told, and certainly not the most heart rending. In fact much of Act 1 went on when we were off stage and out of the picture and told the story of the child who will soon be ours, but is as yet completely unknown to us.

Act 1 was a tale of two stories – heading towards each other – but for now completely distinct and so very different. Everything about the staging will have been different as the two stories unfolded in alternate scenes – the lighting, the music, the scenery, the cast of characters. One day we will read at least a partial script from those Act 1 scenes, but our new daughter or son will have lived them. Right now I have no idea where they are in their story, but just that I am aching to become part of that story.

Roll on Act 3 when our stories will fully intertwine – but of course I’m getting ahead of myself. First those stories need a meet cute (to quote from the Christmas film ‘The Holiday’) –  they need to stumble across each other’s paths – which brings us to Act 2.