Adoption Day

It's done.  It's finished.  We finally have our new addition to our family permanent.  We are so happy and blessed.  Unless you have actually experienced a situation like this, it might be hard to understand the stress of the journey and why adoption day is so special.

In our case we adopted out of foster care and it has been a VERY LONG journey.  The state claims to want permanency for children in care within 12 months.  Of course that rarely happens and a more reasonable timeline based on how legalities have to be followed is 18 months.  Again, that seems to rarely happen.  It is so sad that these kids get hung in the system for so long. Permanency basically means either the children are returned home or placed in guardianship or adopted.

When a child remains in the system with no permanency it causes so much extra trauma.  There is not closure in one way or another for the children and generally the dysfunction that caused them to be placed in the system to begin with continues.  I will probably touch more on this in another post some time.

For now, we are just overjoyed to have our new permanent family member.  She has been a part of our lives for almost four years.  That is too long in foster care, but that has now ended.  What an exciting and joyous day!  We are blessed!