Adoption Story --- Part 11

In case you missed anything:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10

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LDS Family Services doesn’t allow you to apply for another adoption until after your child’s first birthday. We went to the agency and picked up the paper work to reapply in December 2003. We were approved again in March 2004. Then they wait began. This was a transitional time at our Agency, they kept changing around our caseworkers, thankfully they were more than willing to work around the fact that we did not want the same caseworker that we had for Micayla’s adoption.

We received several phone calls from the agency about babies. The babies they were calling us about were special needs. My, my did we hear some sad stories. We heard about micro-preemies, homelessness, cerebral palsy, and addiction. While we were very grateful to the caseworkers for keeping us on their minds we just didn’t feel that a special needs adoption was what we were supposed to do. We weren’t trying to be picky or anything it just didn’t feel right.

This wait wasn’t quite as hard as the first, although I still lost it when my baby sister announced in 2004 that she was pregnant and then my other sister announced that she was pregnant while Staci was in the hospital giving birth. At least we had Micayla and if no other babies were meant to be with us that was something we were alright with. In May 2005 Micayla had heart surgery and that occupied my time.

About the time of her surgery Micayla started doing some interesting things. She would look at the ceiling and laugh or wave. We would ask her what she was looking at and she always said “A baby.” Did she know something that we didn’t?

On Friday July 1^st at about 5 pm our caseworker called us and told us that there were some policy changes that they needed to talk to us about. She was pretty insistent that we come in on Tuesday. Matt was in paramedic school and he had Tuesday afternoon off so we set the appointment.

It really didn’t dawn on us right away how strange it was that they call us the Friday before the July 4^th weekend to set an appointment for July 5^th. By the time the 4^th came we kind of talked about, almost jokingly, that maybe they had a baby for us.

Tuesday came with the promise to our families that we would call them as soon as we found out what was going on.

On the way to the appointment we kids of decided that we were tired of the rollercoaster and that if they told us something “stupid” we were just going to give up and have them pull our file.

The beginning of the appointment was pretty dumb. The case worker just asked us some questions related to our file. Then she talked to us about a couple of policy changes that were in the works, nothing seemed so important that we needed to come in right away.

At one point during the conversation our caseworker asked if we had any questions. I asked, “So where’s our baby?” Her response was, “We have to get through this part before we get to the good stuff.”

To be continued.........................