One Down...

By now we were fairly certain we were going to be a family of 6. But of course the state & court system do not like to move too quickly, so we were still working on their adoptions. Although the rights of Amata's mother had been terminated, they still had to terminate the rights of her father, even though nobody knew exactly where he was. So, they had to first try to locate him, when that failed, they then had to get permission from the court to publish the trial date in the newspaper of his last known address. Finally, in October of 2006 the rights of Amata's biological father were terminated. Which meant we could finally start the adoption paperwork. But...our social worker had gotten another job, and the social worker who was then assigned to our case (and the only other one who had done adoptions in this county) had her baby at the end of October and was on maternity leave until January. The county was extremely short staffed during this time, so nothing was done on our case until she got back.

Then we started the paperwork. I think there were 3 or 4 separate forms that had to be sent to the state for permission, one at a time before we could even get a court date. But finally we received word in June that we had finally been granted permission so we could now proceed with the court date to finalize Amata's adoption. The earliest date we could get was in mid-July. However, the state passed a law effective July 1, 2007, that all adoptive parents had to be fingerprinted and have a new background check done. Oh, but they didn't actually have the forms ready until around July 10th. So, we went to court on July 17th, but the judge could not make the ruling to finalize the adoption until the background check was done.

The background check was finally completed around August 1st, but by then, the judge was on vacation. We were starting to wonder if her adoption would ever be done!
It was August 10th, 2007 when the judge signed the order to finalize Amata's adoption.