6 Month Update: What a Difference a Year Makes

As of January 31st we have been a waiting family for 6 months already!  I consider this a milestone.  First of all, it just sounds like a milestone.  Second of all, many families are placed between 6 and 18 months of waiting.  Now, "many" does not mean "all" or even "most," but it does mean that believing it could happen in a tangible amount of time is emotionally permissible.  At the turn of the year I started documenting my tasks at work more thoroughly in case I have to leave quickly, we've been looking at cribs to figure out what we like (hoping to hit some sort of mega sale), and I've even purchased a few more baby items like a pair of pacifiers, just for fun.  This may sound like we're opening up a bit, and we are, but I must confess that we still haven't brought ourselves to try out the car seat in the car.  One thing at a time :)

This month also marks one year since we left our first agency.   What a difference a year makes!  In the last two weeks we've had a lot of interaction with our current agency (2 hour in person 6 month follow up with our social worker and a 5 hour Saturday training), and our decision to work with them has been confirmed on all new levels.  Our social worker is easy to talk to and genuinely seems to care about us as individuals, a family, and future parents and overall makes us incredibly comfortable.  With the other agency we just felt judged, and here we feel more and more at home.  The timing of this overwhelming confirmation, in the same month but one year later since our bad experience, is a form of confirmation in an of itself.  For this we are very grateful. 

In our 6 month meeting, which was mostly chit chat, "how are you doing," and "do you have any questions," we asked our counselor when to expect the waiting to become more difficult and what she recommends as a healthy and effective coping tool.  She warned that every family has some sort of unspoken time in their head by which they expect to be placed.  Once this passes people find the wait more difficult.  She's experienced two general attitudes among waiting families.  The first grows increasingly more bitter and entitled as their wait draws on, and the second, though not finding the wait easy, is able to see the positive ways that their journey is shaping their lives, their relationship with their spouse, and their future as parents.  Those families with the latter attitude generally cope much better.

I've had bitter days for sure, but overall we are trying very hard to let God show us how we are being blessed through this journey.  (That's a topic for another blog update).  Please pray that we continue to foster a healthy attitude as our wait continues to bring us closer to our children, and of course that the time is soon, Lord willing!

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A little more about the statistics for our agency in 2012:

• 90 birth families received some degree of counseling as they worked through their option to parent or place
• 17 infants were placed with adoptive families through our agency
• Usually our agency places low 20 something infants per year, and this year had a below average number of placements.  This may be due to the low birth rate overall this year for the population at large.
• Our counselor is telling families to expect to wait 3 years, instead of the 2 years we were initially told.  This is largely due to her desire to manage expectations since a few families have been waiting over three years, though most have still been waiting 2 years or less.
• At four months of waiting our profile had actually been shown twice (this is good news).  We haven't asked since then.
• About 1/2 of the families this year became parents with 1 week notice or less!
• Activity at the agency seemed to be picking up at the turn of the year.