Yes, you read the title of this post correctly! We've received our first placement call yesterday morning, and we're not even licensed yet! Let me back up a bit and explain.

To begin with, I hadn't gotten around to telling you all that our application reveiw has been put on hold a second time due to incomplete information! I got an email last Friday from the state employee, Martha, who's reviewing our application. She explained that there were three things our licensing agency didn't provide her with and also that there's a Federal Law, The Walsh Act Check, that our state has suddenly decided to enforce! What this means is that we have to have another background check done in the state that we lived in 3 years ago, in addition to all the checks we had done in our current state of residence! We were told this can take 3+ weeks to get this information back!

This past weekend was a rough one for me. I was feeling angry, frustrated, and down right discouraged that our licensing agency had dropped the ball yet again, causing us unnecessary delays! I shot an email off to the director of the agency expressing concern over the way our application has been handled, outlining the facts of the delays, and I asked for her response.

Monday, I got an email from the Program Director we'd been working with telling me that she'd taken care of everything on Martha's list, except for the additional background check. For that, she emailed me the form and instructed me to fill it out, have it notarized, and send it to another state employee. That was all done by yesterday morning.

I got an email back from the director on Tuesday, basically apologizing profusely for the frustrations we've experienced and telling me she'd be looking into it further with her staff.

Now for the good part, at about 10:00 a.m. yesterday morning, I received a phone call from our agency. A foster care specialist, Amy, who we're meeting for the first time tomorrow was calling. I immediately suspected the worst, that she was calling about something else that was going to cause us even more delays.

Imagine my shock when she told me she was calling about a foster-to-adopt placement! I quickly grabbed a piece of paper and started jotting down information as she shared it with me.

Now, obviously I can't share many of the details of this case with you, but I will tell you that the call was for an 11 month old girl who's been in foster care since she was 2 months old. The foster family she's with now is only willing/able to handle straight foster care and now that this little girl's mom has stated that she wishes to relinquish her rights (she's denied the visitation rights that she was given) the state is moving her from a foster only to a foster-to-adopt case plan.

Amy warned me that there'd be a lot of homestudies submitted for this little girl because she is young, Caucasian (we could care less about that but it's important to others), and has shown no signs of developmental delays. She has some dietary restrictions but they're pretty minor. That's it.

Amy also warned me that our homestudy could be set aside because we're not yet licensed (although we may be licensed by the time a decision is made on this little girl) and we haven't met the state requirement of 240 hours of foster-only before being eligible for foster-to-adopt. Amy did say that sometimes they overlook that requirement so it could happen, but no guarantees.

I made a quick call to Oronzo and asked him if he wanted our homestudy submitted for this little girl and he said, "absolutely!"

I called Amy back and told her to go ahead with submitting our homestudy. We know it's a long shot but Amy thought it was worth the effort. She said that even if this one doesn't work out, it gets our homestudy out there for review by those that make the decisions on placements so that the next time around they'll be at least a little familiar with us.

So, now we continue to wait. We wait for the additional background check to be done. We wait for the review of our application to be finalized. We wait for our license to come through. Most importantly, we wait to hear news on this little girl. Amy said we probably wouldn't hear anything for a few weeks.

Oddly enough, now that we know we can receive placement calls even though we're not totally licensed, I'm feeling better about the waiting.

So there you have it, news of our very first placement call! Your prayers would be appreciated. Yes, this situation is a long shot, but miracles do happen. We have a little miracle named Snuggle Bug tucked into bed safe and sound right now, so there's hope in this case as well!

I'll be sure to keep you all posted as I hear more. As always, thanks for your ongoing support!

Labels: adoption, adoption #2, Homestudy, placement call