Gobsmacked: A wonderful british word meaning utterly astounded, completely dumbfounded, shocked, being totally speechless, unable to think of anything to say. In short a completely and utterly the perfect word to describe our moment of utter panic.
Two weeks ago we got a ebullition from one of the adoption photolistings we use to keep an eye out for potential kidos. But the profile was of a kido who lives in Washington. When we started our journey with our adoption agency, we decided to keep our search confined to Oregon only. But over the course of the year, the pool of available kidos has seemed to noticeably shrink. So we E-Mailed our caseworker to get her thoughts on the matter. We liked the look of this kido and wanted to know if perhaps now was the right time to expand our search into Washington as well.
Last Mondaywe got a long E-Mail response from our caseworker. She agreed that we should expand to look in Washington, and she gave us the 411 on how to do that correctly. Which is great, as we had just found another kido online from Washington that we like.
She also let us know that Oregon has changed the way they do adoption committees and we can now add a personal 1 page cover letter addressed directly to the caseworker from us that will be sent with our homestudy. There were more changes as well as how the meetings run and who approves us. But then the shoe dropped. She told us that she was being reassigned and we would be getting a new caseworker.
A new caseworker, just saying it makes our tummies do a loopy loop. Our current caseworker wrote our home study, has had over a year to get to know us. Not to sound corny, but she has been there from the beginning. Our caseworker is the person who champions us to the adoption committee and to the kido’s caseworker. Now we have someone who doesn’t even know us. Changing caseworkers is a scary concept and a even more scary reality. Some pretty crazy doubts started floating around in our heads.
So yesterday we both got off work early and headed down to Boys and Girls to meet our new caseworker. The meeting with was with both our old and new caseworker. In fact our old caseworker ran the meeting and did most of the talking.
She did a small recap on our first committee that we were sent to and then talked about the changes the Oregon adoption system is going through. The 3 panel committee is now gone and has been replaced by a much larger voting pool including the child’s caseworker & lawyer. The 2nd big change is if the kido is young enough and is has low special needs then they might not even call a committee. The caseworker just picks the family she feels is best. It’s all really new so don’t quote us as we most likely just said it wrong, we got the 10 minute version of a much bigger story. As we learn more we will post more.
We had the chance to look in the big adoption profile books and only found one kido to add to our list (maybe, it was an old profile). One of the things we were concerned we did talk about to both of our caseworkers about was the lack of kidos to match with. But it seems the pool of kids is not smaller but the pool of waiting families is getting larger and larger. Which is not so good for us, but good for the kidos looking for families. We did talk more about looking into Washington as a resource.
Our new caseworker seems nice, she is going to stop by our house and do a home visit to get to know us and our world a little better. So we will have more to report on later as we all get to know each other better. Our initial impressions are very positive and we look forward to working with her.
After the meeting we drove home the back way and had dinner at the old spaghetti factory for a large infusion of carbs and cheese.