Home visit

We had this month's home visit with the worker today. In our county, the worker is supposed to see the child in the home every month, which for us means one-on-one face time with the worker, where she answers my ten million questions.

This week, we learned that the worker is postponing the conversation with the mom about the mom voluntarily surrendering her rights, because the mom isn't making very good choices right now, so it would be sort of hard to have that conversation without it feeling coercive (I think this is the right decision, even though it's hard for us).

The worker also told us that the grandma flat-out asked, at her attorney's urging, if the county wanted to place the baby with the grandma, and the worker told her no. This is not a surprise, but it's interesting to hear it like that in black-and-white, or whatever the auditory version of black-and-white is. (This doesn't mean the baby won't end up with the grandma, because that's up to the judge, not the worker.) The worker now wants to get us involved in a "family teaming" program the county runs, to help us build a relationship with the grandma. The ideal outcome would be that the grandma sees that the baby is well cared for and learns that she can trust us to keep our word about keeping her involved in the baby's life, and thus agree that the baby is in the right place. If that works, then the idea will be to add the mom in, and have our relationship with the grandma help the mom see that surrendering her rights would be okay.

We'll see if any of this happens. I know the grandma feels strongly about family staying together, so it's possible she won't be interested. She has not had any problems with us so far, and has been friendly and grateful for what we've done for the baby, but that might be because she's seen it as temporary.

Andy is very good at maintaining a level head and knowing it's still not likely we'll get to raise this precious awesome baby. I'm not very good at that, and I'm having a hard time stamping down the seed of hope that keeps poking up in my chest.