First Meeting w/ Adoption Worker
I met with our new adoption worker and Cookie's departing worker this morning, and took notes on how the process will work from here on out.1) We are to fill out paperwork on our financial status (same ones we filled out to become foster parents).
2) We are to submit copies of last year's 1040 tax forms.
3) We are to find and secure an adoption attorney who will write and send a financial breakdown letter to us and the adoption worker - this will be used to create our contract.
4) Cookie's case files have been assigned to a worker who will be compiling the presentation summary. This is basically a huge file of everything the state has on Cookie, her family, her past, and every family member who went through a home study in an attempt to get her but did not qualify because of their past involvement with the state. We will be told everything the state knows in great detail.
5) Once the TPR is final-final AND the presentation summary is complete, our worker can prepare our contract for us to sign. We sign it, and then we become Cookie's official pre-adoptive parents (as if we aren't already). We then have to wait 30 days before finalizing the adoption (what for, I do not know).
At some point, Cookie will be re-assigned a Guardian ad Litem (or however you spell it) who will also have to come out to our home and write up a report to submit to the courts. I do not recall in what order that happens. Ugh - it just seems like a lot.
6) The adoption worker, the lawyer, and the GAL will both turn in all their respective paperwork to the court, and we will await a court date to finalize the adoption.
It looks like it will be sometime in January at best - February (or March) at worst. The adoption worker says the team that prepares the presentation summaries are swamped as there have been many TPRs recently. So, like Queenbee and her husband, we must wait for that to be finished first.
I can't believe that in this country, a criminal has a right to a speedy trial, but a child without permanency does not have a right to a speedy adoption. It is wrong.
But this face - this face is so...right:
posted by No Longer In Crisis @ 11/16/2006 02:56:00 PM
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