Adoption Process Update (long post)

As many of you now know, Jonathan and I started the process towards adopting on Jan 6 when we attended an orientation meeting. Since then we have attended 5 training sessions and have one more tomorrow night. This will be a panel discussion with some foster and adoptive parents. (This one should be a lot more fun than the other classes.)

During the last 3 weeks, we have also been gathering a lot of information, answering a lot of questions, getting physicals, TB & drug tests, and fingerprinted. All of this adds up to about 4-5 inches of paperwork that we have turned in as part of the application process.

In about 2-3 weeks, we should have our first home visit. A case worker will come to the house and do an inspection. He/She will be looking for possible safety issues, the amount of living space we have, the status of our food cupboards, and getting more in-depth interviews with all 5 of us. There will be at least 2 home visits.

Once the visits are done, our home study will be written and submitted for approval. Two levels of approval are needed - the county supervisor and the regional supervisor. This process will take about 2-3 months.

Once we are approved, we can start asking for more information about specific children. We have identified a number of candidates from a book called My Turn Now that is published monthly with short bios of children available for adoption. The book is also available on-line. Click Here Our information will also have been entered into a state-wide database to try and find children who might fit into our family.

Once we have a child or sibling group identified, we will be able to meet with the child(ren) at their current foster home. This will be followed by some day long visits and a weekend visit.

If all goes well, we hope to have our new child(ren) placed in our home this summer. This will give them a short amount of time to adjust before starting at a new school. (Probably a new school, since the children in the system can be anywhere in the state.)

There is a "probation" period (3-6 months) with the children living in the household and a case worker checking in periodically before the adoption will be finalized. Once finalized, the child(ren) will be issued a new birth certificate with Landon as their new last name.

We have a long list of phrases/issues from the book My Turn Now that either encourage us or concern us from the bios. We also have a fairly good idea of how we will arrange the sleeping arrangements in this house. We had a number of discussions with our 3 kids about what they would like to see in new siblings.

I won't go into all of it, but this is the general idea.

* 1-3 children
* age range of 10-16 years old (we can flex, especially if dealing with a sibling group)
* boys or girls
* no preference for race (although an Asian child might feel a little more at home with the extended family, at this time there are none in the system)
* willing to deal with some handicaps/emotional problems but not a medically fragile child because of long moves making care difficult

And one last side note- because of legal privacy issues, we will not be able to post any photos of the kids until after the adoption is final.

I hope this helps clear some things up. Right now we will be entering a waiting stage. I think this is planned so we can practice our skills in patience. Maybe give us time to have our heads examined for planning to add even more teenagers to our family.