Baby "M"

What I left out of the last blog post was that when Ian called me and said we were going to lose Baby “A,” he said, “Apparently, there’s a baby boy a month younger who has become available. I said ‘yes.’” Now, Ian is the cautious one of the two of us. He notices the crack in the ceiling and worries that the attic is going to come crashing down on us, and he notices that the pool has extra leaves in it and worries that the pump is burned out and is going to cost us hundreds of dollars. (For the record, he was wrong about the ceiling, and right about the pump)

The baby – we’ll call him “M” – has been with the same foster family for 19 of his 20 months on earth, and they couldn’t keep him any more, even though parental rights with his biological mother had been terminated almost a year ago. This means that almost all of the hassles of foster-adoption, the two or three hour long visits several times a week with the biological parents, the threat of having him returned to them, all that wasn’t going to happen. We were asked if we could pick him up Thursday between 1 and 1:30, and we said we would, but we still had Baby “A” and only one crib.

There was a behind the scenes kerfuffle, and we brought Baby “A” to our agency where the people who had brought in his four-year-old sister were meeting us. They seemed very nice, though after the fact, I learned there had been a bit of a funny British/American translation issue. Ian wanted to tell them that “A” wouldn’t sleep in his crib without duress and he used the British word for crib, which is “cot.” “You let him sleep in a cot instead of a bed?” they asked, horrified, imagining the poor baby in a fold-out army issued number.

Having decided we were taking on Baby “M” stifled our grief over losing Baby “A.” We were like a restaurant, flipping lunch service for dinner service in the 24 hours between babies. Today, we went down to the Culver City DCFS office and met him.

He’s handsome. Our social worker called him “beautiful,” and that might be more accurate. We were told there might be some behavioral issues – scarcely surprising for any foster child, let alone one on his first day away from the only family he’s ever known – but aside from a brief cry when Ian picked him up, he was good as gold and remained that way all day long, from driving back to our house, to play time, to dinner time, to bath time, to bed time.

Tomorrow, he’s got a visit with the pediatrician, and our three day weekend. We’re hoping this angelic demeanor will last. Everyone keeps saying to us, “This is the one.”

Feels like it.