2nd Conversation with Anne

        One thing that our caseworker had told us in the very beginning was to not read too much into a skipped phone call or missed doctor's appointment. After all, if this is a woman whose life is in such turmoil that she feels like she is unable to parent, how reasonable is it to expect that she will always be available to answer her phone at a set day and time? But, nonetheless, when Anne's social worker was not able to get in touch with her for our phone call Friday, there was a part of me that began to worry. Did I say something wrong last time? Did I word something poorly in the card that I sent her? Has she changed her mind? Did something happen to the baby? It was ridiculous, and just as our caseworker had said, it meant nothing. Anne was very sick that morning (she's had the same bad luck as I did when it comes to being one of the few who has morning sickness their entire pregnancy!) and hadn't thought about calling to cancel, and when she was finally able to fall back to sleep she didn't wake up when her phone rang in the other room. The point in opening this post with that story is to verify that sometimes a missed phone call is nothing more than a missed phone call. I think that we all hear so many stories of disrupted adoptions that it is easy to get worried over nothing.

      So anyway, our second conversation (Monday morning) was much less nerve wracking than our first. We already knew that we were comfortable speaking with each other, and there was less awkwardness. I don't think that we talked about anything very serious at all, except that she opened up a bit more about her family. Most questions were chit-chatty and just "getting to know you" types of topics. She had thought of some more details that she wanted to know about our family and daily routine, but there really weren't any uncomfortable or overly personal topics.
     A big chunk of our phone conversation went towards discussing our upcoming visit at the end of this week. She asked if we would be comfortable meeting some of her family members, and we told her that we wanted her boyfriend (baby girl's biodad-- we'll call him "Ben") to feel included to join us in anything that we did. We set a time and location for where to meet up, and exchanged cell phone numbers so that we would have a way to get in touch with each other once we were in town.
    Just like the first phone call, after this call was over the case worker called Anne to make sure she was comfortable with everything and then called us back again. This was an incredibly short phone call, and she was just reiterating how excited Anne was that we were coming to visit. She did tell us a bit more detail about the relationship dynamic between Anne and Ben, and what little she knew about Ben's personality from their one brief phone conversation. She warned us to not take it personally if Ben avoided us entirely while we were there, even though Anne had seemed fairly certain that he would like to at least join us for dinner one night.

So that's all that I really have to report from this second phone call. I'm expecting a call from our case worker tomorrow to talk about some of the "rules" about our upcoming trip.