Phew!

I actually slept last night (7 solid hours), though I'm not betting on that being the last of the jetlag, and my mother is making coffee, so I'm pleased. Although her laptop seems to think I am moving the cursor randomly from line to line and typing in odd places so if you find any incomprehensibility, don't blame me.

Yesterday I escaped the maternal clutches and took my life (and our car) in my exhausted, LH drive, automatic-accustomed hands and gingerly made my way down to the top of the hill where the Hairy Farmer Family live. It's about 10 miles from my mother's house and very beautiful it is too. And of course they are a very lovely family, with a very gorgeous (and yes, he is verbal, just not very good at pronunciation, honest!) child, and it was delightful to meet them, and refreshing to talk to someone who knows exactly where we are coming from in so many senses, even down to the school system and local knowledge and geography and, well, I hope I'll be back. Especially if there is cake.

In a bit of a rush before we left CA, we finally heard back from the Nice Agency in state - who (yay!) think they can deal with us. Now, these may all be prejudiced positions, but I can't help feeling that we will do better with this agency for a number of reasons. One of them being that you can actually look at the website without going blind (in the case of one agency) or feeling someone knocked it up on the back of an envelope (in the case of the other). One of the others being that this agency takes gay couples, unmarried couples, and singles (I think cluttered-website-agency also does but blank-website-agency only takes married couples). Although we do not fall into those categories, I think we are probably more likely to appeal as a family to someone less conservative.

I also had a pleasant chat with the UK agency who were very surprised we hadn't received their information pack (frankly, I wasn't) and promised it would be sent out immediately, and asked nice but not too difficult questions about where we were in the process and what we were thinking of doing, to which I gave the right kind of answers ("yes, we do want to adopt from the US because we're more likely to get an infant but also because we want to try and have some degree of openness which might not be possible elsewhere"). Middle-class, high earning families are the ones that adopt internationally here, but generally there are at least a few who don't want any contact with birth families and that's why they choose international (certainly there were some on the course our friends were on, who chose China over Central America for just that reason). So at least we'll get social worker brownie points for that. I didn't ask if we get let off part of the course for having done the fostering course, but I will at some stage.