We were given a 20 minute video of our future children last night by their foster carer.

Words cannot describe the enormous grins wrapped across both of our faces as we sat watching it along with our social workers last night. The children we had so far only known by names, conversation and social workers reports are becoming much more real. We spent a couple of hours listening to their carer’s stories – the little things – the things that matter. Who likes what to eat, what so-and-so said yesterday, their favourite books, their favourite colours, the songs they sing.

Notice I am now referring to them as “our future children”, rather than “our prospective children”. The opinion of the adoption team is that barring an administrative cock-up, the matching panel next Friday is pretty much a formality. I have still to wrestle with how much information I ever let out about them in this blog – I hope you will understand that I may never share their names, their sex, or even their ages – or certainly not for several years.

The children will be told about us at new year. We are preparing scrap books, and a video telling them all about us, our house, our family, and our life. At the moment they are the only ones who don’t know we exist. Their foster carer’s excitement is palpable – she wandered through our house saying “oh my god – they are going to love this”, over and over again.

It’s suddenly becoming much more real, and much more exciting.