well....

We had our social worker meeting this evening. It went...well....we had everything we needed to, we were given another stack of paper to sign/read and some things they needed elaborated on (to help her write the official PPA).

She will be working on our official PPA next week (her spring break from school), then we will be meeting with her April 8 to review everything she wrote and approve its submission to Greensboro (main branch of our agency), from there it goes to the state to be approved as foster parents in NC (since we are adopting from the foster care system this is a requirement). ONCE it is complete/approved by our agency we start looking at children, and IF there is a child we like/get chosen for we can even meet them and start getting to know them, they just cant stay over night until we are officially licensed foster parents.

So as I said the meeting went "Well" but it was also a little discouraging. She was "real" with us which I appreciate and commend...basically she said the number of children in care that meet our age/gender criteria are slim from what shes heard/seen. They basically get almost no singleton children ages 0-5 and if they do the chances they are a girl are even less (like 1/2), (our written down ages right now are 3-9 girl) That is hard to hear especially since we already wrote down numbers above and below our ideal if we had to choose ages (which would probably have been 5-7 years)..so we are supposed to go back and discuss it and let her know if we want to broaden it. She said she is fine with leaving it at 3-9 girl but said that once we were up for renewal, if we had not been chosen, etc they would probably not continue on in renewing us. Also they get a lot of siblings. Would we love to help siblings, sure, most people would, BUT financially how would we afford sports, trips, and other things we want for our kids if there are three of them vs two!? We cant imagine.....so siblings are out unless a job increase comes in NOW or we figure out how to afford it otherwise!

While our social worker does not know everything and has realistic doubts to share with us, we KNOW that we SERVE an awesome, MIGHTY God who ALREADY KNOWS what child we will adopt, or IF we will adopt a child. There are children out there that needs homes, best case scenario no children we can parent will need a home in NC.....that's great, right!?

But a little discouraging to get THIS far into the process to hear this realness......So we are praying about expanding our ages/sibling abilities and will see what the Lord does.

So while it was a good meeting on paper it was a little bit of a discouraging meeting too.

Keep praying folks!