We adopted our two foster children several Fridays ago! And yet we were still waiting…
We were waiting because their youngest biological sibling was still waiting too. And she was adopted last week, so now all 8 kids are adopted into safe & permanent homes!
The two we adopted have been living with us for over three years… the final count was M lived with us for 1,157 days before she was adopted and D was at 1,137 days in foster care. Those numbers hit hard, because safe permanency should not take so long.
Our case had a lot of ups & downs, and it’s part of why I’m writing a book about it- I want others to see how difficult the system can be, how our state of Indiana holds reunification (even when not safe or what’s best for a child) still as the ultimate goal in each case and how a judge who didn’t know what she was doing skipped out on her job and made it ours to fix the problem.
It was a disaster…. And now it’s over! FINALLY!!
But the story is still in me, so it needs to be told. In addition to the book I’m writing, I started a podcast with my friend Kim, to tell our stories about adopting from foster care and raising kids from hard places. You can hear our first episode here!
My kids watching construction from the top of the Hamilton county courthouse, right after the adoptions were finalized!
We ended up adopting our children in a county about two hours away, because no attorney in this area would take our case. Many of them had conflicts of interest or didn’t understand the complexities of DCS & adoption law. Additionally we were refilling our previous adoption petitions with the knowledge they could potentially be contested, which required past experience in that matter.
In Indiana you can petition to adopt in the county you live in, the county the child’s case originated in, or the county where your lawyer practices. In the end, we did the last one, because our adoption attorney suggested it and as she has the majority of work to do with potentially contested adoptions, having the court be just blocks from her office made the most sense.
By the time this adoption photo was officially made, our kids had had seven case managers, four department lawyers, two adoption lawyers, plus one lawyer intervening on their behalf, four judges saw the hearings for their foster case, two judges did the adoption side of things, and the one constant besides us was their CASA volunteer!
Those numbers are crazy, especially when statistics show that having more than three case managers makes the likelihood of adoption dropping to less than 2%! This is part of why we had to hire lawyers and get involved! While our children did not have contested adoptions, we actually had parental consent by the time we got to adoption proceedings, their youngest sibling did have a contested adoption, which is why it took a little longer for that adoption to take place. We are so grateful that through adoption, we can keep all these siblings in contact and get them together often!
Sam, my husband, with our (then) foster children on the way to the courthouse to be adopted!
This was never the life we planned to have, but here we are, and now we plan to move forward! Thank you to everyone who prayed over our case & our involvement, who donated to help us stay a foster home, who donated to help us legally intercede on their behalf, and were just there for us in so many ways to help us make our home theirs! It’s official and FINAL now! ~Naomi
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