So, it's been a few weeks, but things are moving in an exciting new direction. I heard back from our worker, and ended up speaking with her supervisor. We found out that the agency we're working with for Foster Care, also handles the adoption website for our state, and our worker's supervisor also handles that team of people. She talked me through some of the steps and we found out that we were in the perfect place to switch gears, and try to move forward with the adoption process first.
The first part of the process was looking for a child we'd be interested in. She directed me back to the website where there are dozens (probably 100+) kids listed that are currently in Foster Care and waiting for an actual home. She told us to find a kid we were interested in, hit the "I'm Interested" button next to their picture when we found one, and then things would proceed forward.
I also talked to her a bit about price and learned that while domestic (even in-state) adoption of infants can run upwards of $30k, adopting a kid from Foster Care has a nearly negligible fee. The only real fee is the one to finalize all the legal paperwork, and in some cases (depending on the child) the agency or the state will reimburse the legal fees. So for what will probably be far less than the average of a grand or so for legal fees, we could be proud new parents to a child currently in Foster Care. We were pretty shocked. Not too mention, despite the years it can take for infant adoption, for a kid from Foster Care, we might only be talking a few months or so.
It's a lot to take in all at once, that we could go from potential Foster Parents to actual Adoptive Parents in no time at all. But, we know it's a good choice for us, though we will not be stopping the foster process even as we adopt.
We took two weeks to pour over the website, both together and separately. Sadly, it's set up a little like PetFinder.com and we actually had to stop a few times to make sense of it. There's a picture of a kid with their age, race and a small bio. You click on their name and it takes you to a larger version of the picture, with a paragraph or so about them (including what tend to become recognized as keywords for potential behavior issues). We settled on a large list of 25 - 30 kids. Then, we took the list and came up with our own separate Top 5 lists. We got together, looked at each other's Top 5s and realized that we had 2 similar matches. We talked about it, and decided on one - a 9 year old girl.
I verified with our agency that even though we're not Foster Parents yet that we could continue working through them, and as soon as they said yes, I hit that "I'm Interested" button next to the girl's picture.
Now, while the workers hash out between them whether or not we're a decent match, we wait.
