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Hi I thought I would share our experience of adoption with you. We registered as prospective adopters with our local authority and the experience was great. They were organised and professional from the start. We were allocated an independent social worker who was amazing. We started our journey with the old process so from initial enquiry to approval took 12 months. 6 Weeks later we were provisionally matched with our beautiful DS and DD. All looking great so far. DS and DD were from a different local authority and so we now had to work with them which was not an issue at the time. Matching panel was delayed for 10 weeks as the SW who matched us wanted to make sure everyone had the paperwork in, despite our SW and the children's SW saying it could be completed in 10 days. Never the less we got there and our children came home. That's when the fun began. It was hard enough adjusting to being first time parents with 2 children under the age of 2, but then having to do the SW job was a step to far. The children's first SW left just after the children came home so we expected to have a new social worker allocated. We did...after 2 months and when she completed her first visit she asked too inspect the bedrooms in case I had chains attached to the children's walls!! Happy with her visit, we never heard from her again...Thankfully. After 5 weeks of no visits I contacted the LA to inform them we were overdue a visit. I was promised that the SW would call. A further 2 weeks passed with phonecalls from our SW and ourselves with no response. Then, the following week whilst we had our parents with us visiting, we had a knock on the door from a NEW social worker demanding a visit as we had not had one for 8 weeks. I asked why she hasn't contacted us to arrange as we had our parents with us to which she informed us that the local authority had no contact number for us, which I knew was a lie. After forcing her way through she conducted her visit and made our parents feels so uncomfortable that they had to leave. No apology given. Whilst this was happening I was aware that the birth parents were to be prosecuted . When I asked further about this I was told I would have to find out when the court dates were, myself. I wasn't even informed about the outcome of the prosecution, I read it in the newspaper and when I confronted the LA they had no idea it had even been to court. By this point I had lost faith the the LA adoption agency for the children. The new SW made one more visit then like the others, left for pastures new. I was assured though that before she left, that she had completed everything for the formal adoption hearing. Wrong again....a new social was allocated and 2 days before the adoption hearing, she informed us that there were outstanding issues that the previous SW had not sorted and so the hearing was delayed. We eventually got there and its heaven not having to deal with social services. They made the whole of my adoption leave a living nightmare. What should have been the most amazing experience of our lives, was filled with grief and stress and torment that could have been prevented by people in a position of trust. Luckily its in the past although its something that caused me and my DH a great deal of upset. Every cloud has a silver lining though. We look to a happy future now with the angels that we were blessed with. X