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My husband and I will be finalizing our daughter's adoption in December. :cheer: We are adopting her through independent-open adoption. My daughter's bmom is my cousin by marriage who thought about adoption off and on and then once CPS got involved when our daughter was 5 months old, she ultimately asked us to adopt her. Our daughter is 15 months old and we are thinking about giving her a sibling! My husband and I are both in our Mid twenties, married for 4 years, and we had undergone several injection rounds due to my PCOS with each being failed attempts. We aren't the most wealthy,And I find it crazy for us to spend thousands and thousands for an IVF cycle that may not be successful, nor can we afford the $20 or so thousand it takes to adopt a healthy baby.. So we are thinking about two options: Embryo adoption or special needs adoption. If we go with special needs adoption, we would like to be matched with a newborn or infant. We would like to parent a drug exposed infant. We are certified foster parents in our local county and have gone through training on how to properly care for exposed babies and It's something we agree we may want to do. My questions are: What are your thoughts and/or experiences? And where do we start if we decide to begin this new journey? TIA :)
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Are you licensed for Foster to Adopt? That process can be a good way to parent an infant. The baby may be drug exposed or not. Knowing that you are willing to take a special needs child may help your status.I adopted the Queen via Foster Care. She came to me at 4 weeks of age exposed to drugs. I adopted her at 10.5 months. At that time she was not considered special needs. However, we finalized on National Adoption Day & the fee was abour $350. Since then she has been diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder and now qualifies for adoption subsidy to pay all these medical bills.Challenging at times but oh what a blessing she is in my life. So happy to be Mommy to the Queen.Do you have specific questions I can help you with?
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Thank you for your response! We have completed our trainings months ago and our home study for fost/adopt is awaiting approval from the cabinet and once we get that, from my understanding, we will officially be licensed. My only concern with possibly adopting from foster care is that in training, they made it sound like getting a newborn/infant was impossible. We will be licensed for either gender 0-4 years old. We do live in a some what smaller county surrounded by bigger counties. How long did it take you to get the placement of your daughter? I guess my thing so far with extending my forever family through foster care is that there are no guarentees. We went into fost/adopt thinking that we would foster and if the opportunity came to adopt a child we had been fostering, then we would without a doubt. But at the same time, I'm not sure if waiting to be blessed through fost/adopt is the best choice for us at the moment because are pretty sure we are ready to add on to the family sooner rather than later :confused: ! Im always looking for experiences and advice when it comes to fost/adopt so anything you're willing to share, id love to listen :)
I was very fortunate. I was licensed right before Thanksgiving in '07 and was called about the Queen in mid-January. I had received calls about other children during that time but for one reason or another it just didn't work out. One thing that did help me is I was able to take emergency placements. If you are in a position to do that, it would move you up the placement list. Of course, there are no guarantee's in Foster Care.The Queen was the only child I fostered. Have you cross posted this in the Foster Care forum? You might get more feedback over there.
Have you had a chance to talk to other foster parents in your area? The likelihood of being matched with an infant really does vary a lot from place to place. We were also told during training that being matched with an infant was very hard. But I think part of that is that they wanted foster-adopt parents to be more open with regard to age rather than having a lot of families who were set on an infant. The most accurate picture we got of the process came from other foster parents.
We were open to kids up to five. The oldest child we were called about was 20 months old. We ended up being matched with our son at 3 months old. Families open to kids with special needs or medically fragile kids would have a relatively easy time being matched with an infant here. It would be worth posing the question at a foster parent support group if you have that as a resource.