Careful What You Wish For

I was in the gym this morning, when I got the voice message from our social worker, “You and Ian have been selected as parents for the twins. I’m going to give Ian a call now.”

What followed was a series of attempted phone calls between me, Ian, and our social worker. I was on my cell phone getting bad reception in the gym garage, Ian was dealing with work phone calls, and Kitaho was en route between home and work herself. And then there was my brother and sister-in-law calling in because they knew today we were supposed to get the news, even though we had assured them that since the other family had been waiting for children longer than we have, the odds were that we wouldn’t have good news.

So finally, we all connected. It seems that the twins have more medical issues than we thought, and we’re looking into the seriousness and treatability. They are not developmentally where 11 month old children should be, but that is not unusual for preemies. Once we get the medical records, we’ll know whether they’re progressing or if the issues are serious. And the parental rights have not yet been terminated, though that seems to be the direction things are headed. On the plus side, the kids are apparently mentally and emotionally on target, and particularly giggly.

Next step is another, more detailed meeting about the kids and their needs with a larger group of social workers, and when we get the information on that, we’ll know what all is likely to be involved with taking care of them. And then, if we think we can handle it and want to proceed, we’ll meet them in a couple weeks.

Very excited, but on information overload. It’s a lot to process, thinking about dealing with major medical issues for one child, let alone two, so we’re still a bit cautious until we have more details.

Still – I think champagne’s called for. (But then again, isn’t that always true?)