Thanks to you all for sharing in our excitement! We have been flying high all week and I had to take a mental break last night just to calm down enough to function. Many of you may be wondering what's next. Well, we have a couple of initial decisions to make. Our agency would like for us to consider adopting 2 children instead of 1 to allow for the placement of siblings. We are prayerfully considering this and feel God's peace throughout that process. We are trying to take everything one step at a time, but we are truly in full swing of what had previously felt like a very slow process. I'm grateful our agency quickly attempts to place children with families and we are hopeful that it will be sooner rather than later that we will have found our match(es)!
We are going through the straight adoption process, which is different from foster to adopt process. All the children that will be presented to us will have had their parental rights terminated and be legally free for adoption. Once a child's parental rights are terminated they are "broadcast" to all the local agencies for consideration. Next, our agency will present information about children who are currently available that they believe are a good match for our family. We will let them know of our interest. They will then forward our home study to the CPS worker for his/her review. If we are selected as one of four families to be considered, our agency will represent us at the "four way" meeting. At this meeting the agency sings our praises and CPS determines if they think we are the best fit to parent this particular child or children. If we are selected we are able to read the entire CPS record and ask questions to see if we want to move forward. At this point if we are still interested, we attend a "child presentation meeting" to get all of our questions answered by CPS and the current foster parent(s). If we are still a go, we set up pre placement visits to meet the child or children at their foster home. The pre placement visits progress to over night and weekend visits at our home before the child or children are placed with us. They then live with us for 6 months before the adoption will be finalized and we will become a forever family! Oh what a happy day that will be!
2 comments:
I am thankful that so much is attempted to complete a true family. Each step seems both timely, logical, and above all loving. All of these seem to have as a goal a love-filled, complete family.
Good job explaining the process, do you mind if I copy and paste it to mine when we get there. I don't think I could have written it better. I am so excited for you guys. So is Jonathan and we are routing for the sibling group so that we can have children play together and have large gatherings of fun at each others houses. YEAH!!!
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