We love you Licenciado Bugs Bunny!!

Yesterday morning at the crack of dawn, Ahmed, Maya and I got up, prepared ourselves with all kinds of equipment (baby gym, front pack, bottles, formula, nappies, breakfast & lunch for us, spare clothes, magazines for the long waits, and untold other bits and pieces) and drove to DIF for our 8am interview with the psychologist. We were ready to draw pictures of ourselves (it's been done before, so we practised beforehand!), had written out all our birthdates and those of all our immediate family and their immediate families, had our one word to describe our daughter ready, had practised the pages of interview questions from other adopting families who've kindly provided them.

The psychologist came out to meet us for our interview and we both breathed huge internal sighs of relief. He was just wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wearing a t-shirt with 'Estar Guars' on it - try saying that with your best Spanish accent to see which film that might relate to. Ahmed was instantly smitten. He basically told us he hardly needed to interview us as he could see we were clearly Maya's parents and ready to be a family. He could see she was so happy with us. No scary pictures to draw or wacky one word answers, thankfully. He was deeply embarrassed and apologetic about the huge delays we'd had up till this point. He ranted for a full five minutes about the crazy bureaucracy we'd had to deal with, and how the development of the baby is obviously best when she's surrounded by both parents, and how could the bureaucrats stopping us not see that? He promised to type like a crazed 'bugs bunny' - his words, not mine - to get the report written and to his supervisor by Tuesday, straight after he'd interviewed the biological mother. We both fell madly, deeply, truly in love with this guy.


We then had our interview with the social worker. Again, a lovely, lovely, sympathetic woman, who had unfortunately lost her voice, so conducted the interview in a whisper. Again, she promised to get the report written as quickly as possible. One wee hitch: her meeting with the biological mother isn't until Wednesday, which means a very tight margin. (Tight margin? Small margin? My collocations are out of whack today)

We had our celebratory coffee and smoothies at the 1/2 Naranja Cafe and felt the beginnings of our perma-grins.