The excitement of tracking our dossier is now behind us and many have asked, "what's next"?What's next is that we wait. Some of us are better at this than others, by the way.
And what we're waiting for is a referral. What's a "referral", you ask? The best way that I know to describe it is that it is the process that takes place to match us with a child. Once the agency has a child that they believe to be a fit for our family, we will receive any information available on that particular child. Pictures, information regarding their surrender, any available medical records, etc.
How long will that take?
Well, unofficially we are #35 on our agency's wait list (we should have a more official number in the coming days; this is just the estimate that our caseworker gave us). This doesn't necessarily mean that 34 children will be placed before they get to us. Reason being that some of those with lower numbers than us are specifically waiting for a baby, or a toddler, or a sibling pair/group. Because we are in the "older child" (3-5 year old is what our parameters entail), we could, technically, be matched before #1 (which, of COURSE, is highly unlikely to happen but just wanted to give those of you that are unfamiliar with the process an example of how it works). We have been told to expect this portion of the process to take 6 months although we are both hoping that that is an extremely conservative estimate. Jeff is being the eternal optimist in this regard and has his heart set on something more like 3 months. I guess we shall see.
I hope and pray that he's right but what I know is that God's timing is PERFECT, so we will cling to that and know that He can and will do more than we could ever ask, dream or imagine.
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