Panel in a few hours...

Leaving in an hour to go to panel. Amazing that we've got here and that this is the culmination of a year's interviewing and learning. We're excited and surprisingly not as nervous as we thought we'd be but we'll see what emotions cook up when we're waiting to go in! We have a list of all the panel members, including photos, and nobody looks/seems too terrifying. Going to eat a big lunch now and then spend a little quiet time reflecting and preparing. Having read through our PAR form again today, it seems extraordinary that all 11 panel members have read it, and know everything there is to know about us...

After today, if all goes well, we can move on from talking about us and get on with talking about our son, and that's the bit we're relishing the most.

(Oh, and I'm relishing seeing my husband dressed in an outfit of suit trousers and shirt rather than his usual scruffy t-shirt and shorts! He just walked past saying; 'I feel like I'm going to a wedding!'!!!)

Wish us luck!

Matching panel in October?! No, please, no!!!

Trying, and failing, to concentrate on anything other than adoption. I can't stop thinking about our little boy, about what he's doing now, about everything that has happened to him so far. At home today with deadlines pressing down on me from all sides but unable to stop myself from opening my emails and looking at the photos of him...again...and again...and again. Each time makes my heart do a little flutter. It is still all so unreal whilst simultaneously being the most exciting time ever. I can't quite believe it's all happening and I'm sure that's a feeling I'll carry with me right up until he is here, at home, with us. SWs, both his and ours, are off on holidays during July and August so I'm trying not to think too much about those delays. Our SW told us yesterday that the only matching panel date she could get was October. Our hearts literally sank but she's said she will do all she can to find a window, a cancellation. Because if we have to wait until October I think I will just gnaw off my hand or something. Again, the waiting game.

The adoption triangle

Okay, I said I didn't want to look at any more photos of children waiting for adoption. I said that photos made me confused and unable to think straight, they made me wobbly at the knees and tearful and muddled. But today we looked at pictures of 'our little boy'. Still not quite able to type that without putting it in quotation marks. Still not quite able to leap into that amazing world of whole-hearted, total and utter trust. But he's cleared for adoption so there's no muddling at that stage. Potentially, after our panel on 11th July, things could move quite fast. Our SW came round today with all his paperwork. We read about his birth family - things that made our hearts ache and things that made us shudder - and how generations of people can be tangled and destroyed and messed up in ways that seem inconceivable to us in our safe little worlds. We read about the things he liked, how he has gradually, gradually learnt to trust his foster carers and warmed to them (so we're aware of just how disruptive another move will be, new attachments to form - no illusions there), how he burbles and chatters, how he sucks his thumb. All these things make him real, almost tangible. If I sit very still and listen, I can almost hear him and feel him beside me. Soon he will be here.

Reading Stix's account of her fear of bumping into birth family reminds me how entangled and enmeshed we are with the family of our children as adoptive parents. Reading through all 'our son's' birth mum's story made me reflect on what I was doing in my own life when she was caught up in another terrible drama in her life - she exists out there now, maybe pining for her child, maybe angry and lost. Her son - our son - exists out there too. All of us in the triangle of adoption exist in parallel, each is going to change the other's life, but none of us have met yet. Strange, and ultimately - if thought about for too long - mind-boggling.

Have been trying to explain to friends the complexity of where we're at at the moment - how we don't know where we'll be or what we'll be doing over the coming months. That we're going to have to disappear for about a month during introductions and for the first weeks as a family. People keep throwing invites at us to festivals and the like and when we say we're in the middle of adopting they say 'oh, bring the little one along too'. Difficult to explain it's not really like that, that our little boy can't just be carted from one event to another, that he will need time - perhaps a lot of it and perhaps a lifetime of it - to be settled with us, and to attach properly to us. Nigh on impossible to explain that though, people look at us blankly like we're being histrionic and over-protective. Seems the hiding away bit will be good for all of us.

Right now, though, I'm just dreaming. Full of hope and excitement and, I'll admit it, an edge of fear. Hard to believe that after all these years I'm actually going to be a mother.