I got a call today from the social worker on Baby D's case. I wasn't surprised to see her name pop up as sometimes her parents will have a question for me while they are visiting. I had wrote a really long letter today for them because I had a lot of good things to report. She had her one year well visit, she had her first birthday, her first Halloween, she is cruising, and moving quickly with her crawling. I like to keep them updated with her status and they really appreciate it. I also sent (well, really the hubs sent) two sets of pictures, one for mom and one for dad. They last saw her on Halloween, the day before her first birthday.
What I was shocked to hear was that they wanted to talk visitation, they wanted to recall what exactly we had agreed to in mediation about visitation. It was 2-3 visits a year and quarterly update letters like what I do for visits now with pictures. They wanted to know this because today they decided to sign the conditional relinquishment. A conditional relinquishment in this case means, they only relinquish to us to adopt. If the adoption is not filed, then their rights are retained. I am still in shock, this means they have 7 days to change their mind. I am still very unsure on timelines and where things go from here, but my rough estimates are we are still several months away from the adoption decree. They have to staff the adoption in social services, we have to get finger printed again, we have to re-do our adoption home study, then we file and wait. The wait time right now is estimated at 3-6 months for decree from adoption filing. We got our decree for Miss M 8 weeks from filing, but that is really uncommon.
They set the final visit for November 28th which I realized I wondered why after we got off phone. It seems that visits could continue until the adoption is finalized, but maybe we will set our first open adoption visit around the holidays. In the coming days/weeks, we will figure it out. With Miss M, her termination was when she was around 8 1/2 months but her visitation continued until her first birthday. I guess it just means we need to work diligently on figuring out what this whole open adoption is about and make sure that we follow-through.
I still can't believe it.
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3 comments:
Wow Carly. Congratulations to your family and especially to D. She is very fortunate little girl, although I am sure that you are Chris feel like the lucky ones!
Yes, we definitely feel like the lucky ones here. We are so blessed to have the sweetest, cutest, smartest, most adorable little girls. I never would have guessed how lucky we'd be when we set out to foster and hopefully adopt.
That is huge! We had an agreement with Lil Bit's birthmom upon relinquishment for annual updates and photos along with a birthday visit.
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