Have I told you how great our case worker is? And how wonderful it has been working with Buckner? I must admit that I was a little less than excited about being somewhat forced to go with a private agency. (You can read about that in some of my earlier posts.) But now that we are where we are, I couldn't be happier. I know that the private agency case workers end up with a much smaller case load and can give more attention to each family. I had heard that and was afraid of that too. I didn't think that more attention from CPS was a good thing. I was wrong. I love having a case worker that thinks about me, even when I'm not right in front of her. She emails me to tell me things even when I haven't asked. Just today she sent an email to check in with us and to let me know she had sent an email to the little girls' case worker to see what's happening on that case. We both knew that their case worker said she hoped to make a decision by last Friday. As much as I wanted to, I didn't even have to call and bug her about finding out. She did it all on her own. And she let me know! In a time when good customer service is pretty hard to find, I didn't expect to have such a caring and thoughtful case worker. We definitely won the lottery on this one.
She hasn't been doing this for very long. I'm guessing she's early to mid twenties and pretty fresh out of college. She has told us we are the first family that she has gone through the whole process with. She was my first point of contact with Buckner, did our first informational meeting, and all the training classes. I know she's done some of those things with other families, but we are the first family she will see start to finish. I think she's pretty proud of how quickly we've gotten licensed. (That took effort on both parts and of course, God's perfect timing.)
We've also been blessed to connect with the adoption case manager at our local CPS office. He is the one we met at our first CPS informational meeting. We clicked with him right away too and he is actually the one that helped point us in the direction of Buckner. He and his wife adopted through Buckner a few years ago since CPS workers can't adopt directly through CPS. We met back up with him a few weeks ago at the adoption event and enjoyed our visit. Andrew also met with him today as he was doing some paper work to get on the list of adoption attorneys for CPS. What a blessing it has been to work with these two fine, caring, Christian people.
The are also thankful to have met the little girls' case worker. She was very kind and easy to talk to. I hope that meeting her and talking to her face to face was advantageous for us. I've been afraid that having a large family to begin with would be a deterrent to other case workers. A friend pointed out though just how subjective the whole system can be. It's really up to the kids' case workers. If they've had good experiences with big families, they will work in our favor. If they've had bad experiences with big families, they'll scratch us off the list quickly. I hope that they are intrigued enough by our Dear Case worker letter to at least look into us more.
We are still waiting to hear anything. We are trying not to get our hopes up. Our kids are asking and anxious. They are all excited about new siblings. We pray for them daily. We are already a big happy family, but hope to soon be an even bigger happy family.
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