The last six months things finally started to get interesting. I don't want to get into all the details here, but every month seemed to offer just a sliver of a hint that something was happening with our file. On April 5, we got a phone call from our local agency that a representative from the AB government had tried to email us, but her email had bounced back. I corrected the email address (they had spelled our last name wrong), and asked if she knew what the email was about. She told me that it was because our homestudy had expired! You could have knocked me over with a feather! I thought we were due for an update this July, but somehow, there had been confusion and we were actually due LAST July. We had gone 9 months with an expired homestudy!!! Honestly I was a little choked. I mean, the Vehicle Registrations expire every year, and yet they send a reminder in the mail! Heck, the library emails when you have overdue books! How had this slipped through the cracks for so long?! The gal from CAS was very encouraging and said that really, it was a good thing that the gov't was looking at our file, as it likely meant a proposal was on its way to us. I really think it was a God thing that the first email bounced, as it was so good to find out over the phone and be able to discuss it with CAS first. If I had just received that email out of the blue, I might have blown a gasket!
We scrambled and did our update in record speed. We found out about the expiry issue on a Friday, had our homestudy appointment that Sunday, and completed medicals, fingerprints, intervention checks, and new reference letters over the next 2 weeks. Waiting for the fingerprints and intervention checks to come back was a killer... Every day felt like wasted time! I think in the end, we submitted our updated homestudy and supporting documents on April 26th. We had been told that if we had a proposal waiting, they would process our homestudy very quickly. We waited on pins and needles for the phone to ring...
And waited, and waited. The next 3 weeks were among the longest in my life! Part of my "rush" was knowing that MoT wouldn't start preparing our statutory declaration and translating/authenticating our file until our homestudy approval was done. If we were to get a proposal in the spring, and if we were to have any chance of getting into court before the closures (August & September), everything needed to happen as quickly as possible. Finally, on May 22nd, I couldn't stand it anymore, and emailed Adoption Services to ask how long approvals were generally taking these days. I received a very kind response that we would receive our approval within the week. On Tuesday, May 28th, our approval letter came in the mail, and I sent a scanned copy of our entire dossier to MoT that morning, followed by hard copies in the mail.
We weren't sure what would happen next. We didn't even know for sure if there WAS a child's file waiting for us; we had found out that the first Adoption Services lady who had emailed us was now on maternity leave. What if she had discovered our homestudy was expired while she was "tidying up" for her mat leave, and it had nothing to do with an imminent referral?
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