Adoption Update
The adoption worker called on Monday to tell me that it had been decided that they could use our foster care home study for the adoption. I was of course very excited...right up until she said, "They decided that if you've been licensed with us once, that is enough."
Then I had to explain to her that we had never been licensed with the state, but only by the private agency. So yesterday the social worker who works with a local adoption agency called and she is coming out Wednesday for the first appointment for the home study.
I did check out the agency page though. It looks like facilitate a lot of foster-care adoptions. They have a program for international adoption that actually requires people to take classes on childhood trauma, unlike the OTHER local agency that doesn't. Of course, it is the one everyone uses. They have a page about domestic infant adoption, but it is almost blank and they are not accepting applications from prospective adoptive parents. I am choosing to believe that it is because they apparently have ethical standards that make it difficult for them to compete with the other agency.
I have no idea how long it will take her to write the home study. Given that we are not needing it to be matched with kids already in the system, I am hoping she will be willing to do it quickly. She doesn't have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what sort of kid we can parent. Gary is doing well here and we just need the study done so we can adopt him.
As I recall, our adoption homestudy involved three visits with the adoption worker, and a fair quantity of paperwork. This was distilled into a home study of about 10 pages, which grew to 34 pages when it turned into the adoption petition. (I have it in a PDF and I just looked.)
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the whole process, from the initiation of the home study to the date it was submitted to the court and our adoption hearing was calendared, ran about 3 or 4 months.
I lapsed by over 3 months and *I* was the one to call and say...hey, what do you need from me. Not only that, but during the lapse was the first [and only] times I got placement calls. I sure hope the adoption goes well for you. You've helped a lot of kids, nothing wrong with retiring! [btw, sorry that I filled up your blog post thingy on the right. Apparently, deleting your blog and reposting everything shows up on everyone's feeds. I will be adding posts back to my public page, so it may end up doing it again. sorry ;) ]
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