Meeting #2

We attended our second meeting on adoption this week at Homes 4 Good. It was a very informative presentation on adoption specifically (rather than fostering). We have made some more progress in getting the necessary paperwork done and our training begins Monday night.

We have decided our preference is to do legal risk:

"A legal risk placement is when a child is placed with a prospective adoptive family and the child is not yet legally free for adoption. A child becomes legally free once a parent's parental rights are terminated or the parents have relinquished their parental rights. In the case of a legal risk placement either the termination hasn't occurred yet or it has and is being contested in court by the birth family.

When a family takes in a child that is considered to be a legal risk placement, that family must understand that the child may be placed back with his birth family. This is not just a legal risk in terms of the courts, but a risk of the prospective adoptive family's heart."(definition from adoption.About.com)

This sounds a little scary, but it's actually much lower risk than straight foster care. Our goal is to adopt, however we are more likely to get the right child for our family if they are legal risk or foster children first.

Since we have a young biological child at home already and we both work outside the home (and for other reasons such as we don't like the idea of being an emergency shelter) we prefer not to do foster care (where you can get a child at the drop of a hat). Legal risk children already have adoption as their permanency plan and the risk of them going back to their birth family or being placed elsewhere is actually quite low.