ac73 congrats, sounds fab.
These are the things we did for our child. He was three almost four. If he were younger we would probably not have done all this. Maybe we went over the top!
We have a birth daughter, who was 9 at the time and wanted to involved her as much as we could.
We prepared a photo book using a Tomy electronic butterfly book, which records your voice introducing the people in the family, we used photos of the three of us together, our cat, other stuff and the child's room. We had taken photos of a small bunny in the room and so the bunny appeared in the photos and was given to our son.
The Tomy book itself is quite young, really for babies or toddlers but worked for us. It also depends how good reading skills are. Some children would really struggled to read a lot so hearing the words saying ‘Hello, I’m your new mummy” would be better than trying to read those words written down. We added stickers of things we knew DS liked.
We gave the photo album to the social worker to give to DS before we met him along with three other items:
DVD about us (about 12 minutes) and DD got to film some of it. It was all stuff like feeding the ducks in our village, going to the local park and eating sausages in our house (because we knew he liked sausages).
Scrapbook, only part-way filled. We used stickers of things he liked and also included general photos of animals at the farm park as we know he liked to go to that sort of place. The idea of the scrapbook was less to tell him about us and more to tell him we knew about him! I also planned to add to it once he was here with us, e.g. add photos of my sister/family etc. That hasn’t really happened!
Blanket specially made with his name and date of birth on, I washed it and then slept in the bed with it for about a week. This is a technique for babies really, to get them used to your smell. You would need to think about whether something like this would be a good idea or not. You could do it with a soft toy instead of a blanket, if you wished to.
For a cuddly toy, probably be best off picking something they are already into or familiar with, not just a generic teddy.
For the actual introductions we took cuddly toys:
One we gave him the day we met (as we were leaving, and asked him to look after until we saw him the next day).
One DD brought him the day she met him and handed it to him as soon as she arrived.
One special toy to give in the car to help with the transition when he left the foster carer (not really sure how well that worked out!).
All these were toys we knew he would like.
Once home DD gave DS a special book.
Hope this helps.