Oh yeah. Minor piece of news.

We have a date for panel. 6th April (the day after Easter Monday). Yes, I know, we were shocked too. In an impressive display of forward thinking (which is not to say that she does not normally display this) our social worker calculated that if there's an unavoidable delay we can still fit in a May date before she herself takes a 6 week break and therefore in time to get round the DCSF's imposition of a Very Large Fee for their part of the paperwork, coming in in September.

Sooo... we have three or four more sessions and more homework. This week's homework:

• thinking about some of the circumstances of origin we would and wouldn't be prepared to accept (current answer between the two of us - we need to do a bit more thinking, but I am probably more comfortable with the kinds of conversations this might take and Mr Spouse also needs to think about what he's comfortable with - and I have just thought perhaps we could even - doh - ask our SW for advice on how this kind of thing can be brought up with a child)
  
• thinking about what would be our long-term plans if we had a child who needed significant care in adult life (they do assume that we'll both be around until a child turns 18 but I'm guessing they need to show we've thought about the worst - current answer between the two of us - make sure we plan properly financially for a child in this circumstance).
• some research we need to do on what difference it would make with the possible agencies we've chosen were we to say we'd only accept a Caucasian child versus a child of mixed race - again I think our SW needs to show we've considered the implications of raising a child of a different race.

It all seems very soon - we'll probably have quite a bit more homework as the full report on us will need to be checked as well as minor discussion points like this.