Adoptive Placement

Yesterday was a long day.  I woke up at 5 am sick.  I got the kids to the bus and then called on Sarah to watch the kids for me.  She leaves for college on Saturday so I was very lucky to have her around. When Charlotte showed up she helped with the kids. For long term it takes two people to take over my shoes! I gave instructions for my two homeschoolers through the door to do some specific school work and just napped off and on all morning (when I wasn't in the bathroom).  By 2 I felt well enough to head to town to do some paperwork.

When we arrived our adoptive worker handed us a page that she called the happy paper, the placement agreement. That form also stated that we have 60 days to file for adoption.  No problem with that on our part. We were also handed all of his medical history.  Some of the heart stuff I hadn't seen.  He had SVT and arrhythmia.  The records mention this as if it was two different things.  It also mentions that he had some blocked PAC's. Honestly, I don't know what it all means and I was never explained it by the doctors, I was just the foster parent. I often worried when we were handed our heart baby with a strict regimen of Digoxin if we were really prepared to deal with his heart condition.  However, he did great and hasn't had any problems (we just lost a lot of sleep).

Then she proceeded to read us his entire file.  There were no surprises there.  I think that at this point we actually know more than DSS does about the family.  She also read me every medical appointment that he had, every one that I took him to.  All of his developmental information had been supplied by me as well. Thankfully his background paperwork was only 6 pages long.  (With Emma and Michelle we were handed a 2 inch binder and we had to go through the entire report.)

After initially the pages and signing the background report we signed the Agreement to Place Child in Adoptive Home.  Gladly we signed that page. As of August 18th Benjamin is no longer a foster child, he is now an adoptive placement.  This also means that any subsidy agreements that we have made are now effective.

Next we read and signed the subsidy agreement.  We will get a $300/month subsidy as well as medicaid.  Our state also pays $1500 towards the cost of finalizing the adoption.  Our lawyer does not bill us, he bills directly to the state.

He also gets $1500/year of supplemental Benefits for Medical Assistance.  I actually asked what this covers since it was followed by a page of what it doesn't cover. She said that the only time she has actually seen it used was for respite care, it will cover $500/year of respite care. Would be nice if it covered braces but it doesn't. Because this actually covers very little, we have never used it for any of our other kids.

The entire process lasted about 30 minutes.  It took me longer to get there.  I headed home and went to bed relieved to have the adoption placement paperwork completed.  Now we wait for the lawyers to do their job.