Monday night I got a call from our agency informing us that we are now open to receive a placement! It was after five when we got the call (I didn’t answer, so it was a voice message), so I called back Tuesday morning.

When I called, one of our placement workers informed me that they had a potential placement and asked if we wanted to be put it to take them–a brother and sister of 5 and 6 that, based on the information we had, looked like a great fit for us. I quickly called K (pulled her out of a meeting) and consulted with her.

After giving her the information, she had to go back into the meeting (a staff meeting at the church where she’s the director of children’s ministries) and give the devotional. I waited by the phone for her return call. It didn’t take us long to decide that we wanted to try to get the placement.

I called the placement worker at our agency and asked her to put us forward. Then we had to wait an excruciating few hours to know whether Child Protective Services was going to choose us for the placement.

They didn’t. As it turns out, when CPS sent out the message looking for potential foster homes, they neglected to state that there was a foster home already familiar with the children and that they were likely going there–which is exactly what happened.

Needless to say, K and I were exhausted by the emotional roller-coaster of the process, and understandably disappointed that things didn’t work out this time.

On the other hand, we now know what it’s like to go through the potential (emergency) placement process and the experience quickly built our relationship and trust with our placement workers (who were also left out of the seemingly-important information CPS had, otherwise they would have let us know up front that that might be the case).

We had an in-person meeting with our placement workers yesterday afternoon. This is a standard practice and I’d called Tuesday morning in part to set it up. We understood going into the foster-to-adopt program that there are a lot of variables and that there will often times be things we just do not know when we’re asked to make decisions regarding placements. To the extent that we can, we’ve made peace with that.

I can’t say enough how great our placement workers are–we came away from yesterday’s meeting extremely thankful that we have them in our corner.

And so now, we go back to waiting, watching our phones for that call from the special placement number, which could come at any time, wondering who the children will be and what kind of situation they’ll be coming from, imagining what it will be like but trying not to set up expectations, struggling to keep our minds and hearts open. Impatient.