How patient should we be prepared to be?

Waiting is hard.  At least for me it is.

When we completed our home study, we had specified that we wanted a child or children who were 4 or younger.  Our youngest is 5, so we felt like bringing in children younger than our biological kids was important.  We also had told our caseworker that we wanted to take foster kids who's parental rights had already been terminated-- meaning they were free for adoption, or cases where it was known that that process was the next step.  We didn't want kids in and out of our house at this point since our girls are young, I'm working, and we just didn't think we could handle kids coming into and then leaving our lives.  Our caseworker wasn't very optimistic about us getting a placement because most times, when a case gets to the point of parental rights being terminated, the kids are either older or are going to be adopted by their current foster parents, who they may have been with for a significant amount of time.  We asked the caseworker if she could give us any idea of how long to expect to wait, but she didn't have any answer for us.  We even tried asking "Well, about how long have other families in a situation similar to ours waited, just in general?" but she still didn't give us an answer.  So, we went forward having no idea what kind of a wait we had in store for us. 

I have heard the waiting process described as being like a pregnancy, I've even heard the expression "paper pregnancy" because the whole process is a conglomeration of paperwork.  And I could see and feel the similarities, I mean, in the end, our family was going to grow through a new addition.  But, to me it felt like I was probably experiencing it through the dad's point of view, which was not a bad thing.  I felt fine, no morning sickness, no heart burn, I wasn't exhausted all day long, my clothes still fit, you get the picture. But it definetly was different.  The major difference being, when your pregnant, you know you will be getting a newborn baby, you can find out the sex, it will look like you, and it will come in about 9 months. Where as with us, we didn't know if we would be getting one or two kids, if it would be a baby or up to 4 years old, would it be black, white, hispanic, or mixed, would take 10 days or 2 years.  There were just so many unknowns.  The unknows were stressful, as they would continue to be long after we did get a placement, but those unknowns were part of the process and kept us hopping, a little anxious, and ready for excitement at a moments notice. 

So, the wait ended after only about 3 weeks, well sort of ........