Counting chickens before we're matched

Most potential adoptive chickies are in sibling groups of three.

Since we were approved as a foster/adoptive home in mid-December, forty-two children have passed through my inbox. I've made a binder now, with printouts of all the emails, broadcasts and photos (if included) that have been sent over from the agency. Just keeping track of who's who, who's still on the list and who's been taken off, the paperwork, names and ages and circumstances has become a part-time job. One that I'm really enjoying, because being up to our ears in broadcasts increases our odds of being matched!

So how does it look, the foster/adoption process by the numbers? We have been at this for about a month and a half with the new fost-to-adopt agency. Here's how it breaks down so far:

42: number of children for whom we've received broadcasts
3: average number of siblings in each broadcast
12: number of broadcasts for which we've submitted our home study
2: number of broadcasts for children with whom we did not get matched
1: number of broadcasts withdrawn from consideration due to CPS error
4: number of broadcasts for which we declined to submit our home study
9: number of broadcasts for available children for whom we're still in the running
24: number of hours we get to decide whether to submit for each broadcast

We've seen kids aged 9 mos to 14 years, with an average age of 5 years. 24 of the kids have been boys, 18 are girls. 7 of the broadcasts have been for legal risk foster children, while the other 9 are for children that are already legally free for adoption. Overall, we have already received more broadcasts in a month and a half with our new agency that we did in 9 months with the last one.

One thing I can't allow myself to count is the time as it passes. The years since we started this process, the months of paperwork and training, the weeks and days as potential kids come and go. That's the part of this gig that gets really hard after...well, after a while. I said I wouldn't count.

On the bright side, my mind is filled with images of precious kids out there with whom we could be matched, with the possibilities of parenting. I wish I could share them here, the photos, the inconsistent descriptions, the crazy names! My husband said to me this week, "Sweetie, our kids are going to have weird names." There's just no way around it. We have not received ONE broadcast that doesn't contain at least one child with a name that's either unusual, misspelled, or just plain nuts. Since we can't go around telling everyone "We didn't name them, they're adopted!" we are going to have to allow folks to assume we chose these bizarre monikers or we don't know how to spell. But then, "What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet."