I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but I thought that I would go into a bit more detail now that things are official.
Around the beginning of this year, I proposed to Stephen the idea of volunteering with Big Brothers Big Sisters Calgary. When I was younger, a friend of mine had a Big Sister, and the positive influence she had over my friend left a lasting impression with me. I’ve thought about it over the years, but for some reason, never took the leap and signed myself up to become a Big Sister. Within the last year, I realized that you could sign up to become a Big Couple with your partner, so that’s when I proposed the idea to Stephen. I gave him some time to mull it over, and not too long after that, we started the application process.
I’m not going to lie, this application process is just that: a process. After a quick phone conversation, we were scheduled for an in-person interview. Since we had to have two people interview us (separately, then together), we ended up having to wait a month for our interview. At the interview, we had to fill out paperwork to get a background check and a child intervention check. We just happened to start the paperwork while the Canada Post strike was going on, so our child intervention check was delayed in getting back to us by at least a month. From the time we initially applied, to the time we were approved to start being matched, it took over 4 months. We weren’t matched until this month, so that added on another 3 months. I have to admit that I was starting to get a little discouraged, just because I didn’t realize that it could take so long to be matched. I follow BBBS on twitter, and they would tweet constantly just how many Little Brothers were waiting to be matched, so I couldn’t understand why it was taking us so long to be paired up with one.
We finally got a call this month that we were matched with a Little Brother, and we got to meet him last night. Because of confidentiality reasons, I can’t share anything about him here. I will mention that he’s 9 years old, which is at the older end of the age range that we wanted. The interviews went well last night, so Stephen and I both agreed to move forward with the match. Our Little Brother and his Mom agreed to move forward as well, so we’ll be hanging out together for the first time this weekend.
Life is kind of funny sometime, so naturally, we were matched in the midst of moving. Life is hectic for both Stephen and I, but we’ve agreed to make the effort to see our Little Brother regardless. He seems fairly outgoing, so that will make the getting to know each other phase a lot easier on all of us. We’re taking it slow this weekend; we’ll have him over for lunch, Mario Kart races and talking about future activities that we’d all like to do.
While I’ll be vague about our Little Brother’s details, I will most likely still be blogging about our outings. Those posts just won’t included pictures of him, but I think it’ll still be fun to look back on the memories some day!
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