(I mention pregancy and loss, I hope that doesn't upset anyone!)
Just as the title says really.
So we went hard for adoption, I practically made a brochure about us. (I full on did, actually)
I got ahold of my counselling notes and was prepared no matter how triggering it was, to allow the SW to read them.
I sighted 100s of podcasts, youtube videos, all my learnings from here and AUK, every single docuseries, documentary, everything I'd learnt. Those future learn courses I did back in 2020 etc and the work my husband did with profoundly disabled children to boost his experiences.
I gave intricate details in to our finances and projections for the future, I had a level of savings to ensure that the child would have everything, without impacting our other kiddos, I even had local play therapists and private speech and language in those projections. I wouldn't have relied on the ASF.
2 adoption places wanted to proceed if we chose to however it kept returning to the LA and without their blessing it was a no. I wrote them with our information, I explained other agencies were happy to proceed with my explanations of things.
They told me to wait 3 months because of my autistic son. (He's come on leaps and bounds) and it just felt like years and years of educating ourselves, of reaching out to adopters, of endless childcare experience including with looked after children and being asked would we consider fostering from the other division of our LA, to be repeatedly given a reason to not proceed and we began to suspect if they ran out of reasons to say "6 more months", then we'd simply never be matched with a child, it just felt like we weren't the right people.
I had 8 years struggling to get pregnant in my 20s and after a ectopic pregnancy only one tube, however I've been so lucky and I'm now pregnant, after loss etc I'm very scared to tell people so I'm not announcing it until they're here. (I'm too scared to imagine they'll even be here myself tbh)
So until we're much older and kids have grown up we're not going to be discussing adoption ever again, but I wanted to thank you all for your kindness and support on here and wish your beautiful families the very best 🌸🌼🌺
(If anyone in time browses these boards and would like some adoption based learning to look at PM me and I'll send you our list, BTW!)