Help!

Your first sentence describes me too. I am in northern California. What I have been told is that here we could have a wait of up to a year for a baby... if we went the straight adoption route through the state. We have decided to go the high risk foter-adoption route. I have been told that this shortens the time to under six months. If we take one under four and one over four, it is even shorter. Could that be an option for you? Foster parents often have the first chance to adopt the child they are fostering.Best wishes.

Check with your adoption worker. He/she is the one who knows when a situation could be right for you. Keeping your name in the front of their mind is what is going to help you the most. When was the last time you looked at the bulletin books? Ask your adoption worker at least every other month to look at the books. Don't sit back and wait for your worker to contact you.

Withay makes an excellent point. Stay in front of them as much as possible. Not in an obnoxious way but just checking in. If you can give them a few hours of "volunteer work". Maybe their give-away closet needs to be organized. Children clothes needs to be sorted or something would help. That type of stuff goes a long way. Best of luck! Keep the faith! Your baby is out there but may not even been born yet.

July 2005 First contact with DHS October 2005 adoption/foster classes completed January 2006 all paper work turned in January 2007 home sutdy completed February 2007 casework takes 6 month maternity leave (no contact with DHS at all) February 2008 first committe meeting - committed thought our live would be too disrupted June 2008 second committe - they wanted children closer to the childs age We had three other opportuniies to go to committe but the situation wasn't right for us or the child. Now we will have to redo our expired paperwork for the second time. My caseworker use to email the bulletins ever week but she now is handle the adoption assistance stuff and not really taking care of adoptions anymore. The last I heard we have a new worker but she is still handling the bulletins and homestudies.

Also we have been told that the do not "foster to adopt" here (although that's usually what happens). We live in a small town in a rural area and it could be pretty uncomfortable to run into the bio family at walmart. I also don't know how I would feel foster then having to let go I don't know if I or my family could handle it.

I don't see what your doing wrong. We havebeen having struggles as well. I hasve sent in a lot of inquiries here in Kentucky and by the time they get back to me, the child is spoken for (thats IF they get back to me). We just emailed about a little boy in CO and I got a fast reply email. Now I am waiting for them to look at our homestudy and send a referral for a meeting. Good Luck

Don't sit back and wait for your worker to contact you. ain't that the truth. You pretty much have to do everything yourself and just use your worker as updates. Go to adoption parties, look through books, go on-line, contact children's social workers. Dont wait for your social worker to do it. Some of them are useless.

I called our worker every other week. Following advice I got here on the forums, I often called when I was sure she wouldn't be there. That way I could leave a voice mail and not interrupt her, but still let her know I was interested in hearing about any progress. Our worker told me she'd never had an adoption that came from adoptive parents looking at the online listings, so not to get my hopes up about anything materializing from my own searching. I'm stubborn, so I did have her send out our info about a couple of kids I saw online, but as she predicted, nothing came of it--they were either already placed or their workers never got back to her at all. We did foster adopt, and as she predicted, our placement came as the result of her networking for us with workers in other counties, not my searching online. I am sure that my calling her regularly helped, but what really got the job done was just that she really liked us and wanted to find the right match for us, so she kept calling around. HTH.

I would contact the adoption worker. What town are you in? I can' tell you who to talk to in Hood River, Wasco, Sherman counties. We just finalized our adoption and had our ceremony. Thank goodness!!!! It took us 2 years and 3 months. Good Luck! There is also a website you can go to and see the kids for adoption in Oregon. It is [url=http://www.nwae.org/]nwae home[/url]