ET's Info-Stew

As time goes by I'm getting less and less stressed about our adoption of Emily, and more and more excited. I keep thinking of all the fun times I'll get to experience with her. But there is one aspect of this whole thing that does keep getting worse. Would you be surprised if I told it you it had to do with lawyers?

Our present lawyer came recommended through word-of-mouth to take care of our adoption, and as such we'd be getting a decent deal, financially. He was upfront in saying that his experience with adoptions is fairly limited, not having done one in well over a decade. We were willing to accept this, knowing that he'd have somewhat of a learning curve. What we didn't expect is for Jenny to have to do nearly everything herself because the lawyer was clueless.

The story is very long, but I'll try to shorten it. We contacted the lawyer early, around the 18 week stage, with very little understanding of the process. Surely a lawyer would be able to figure out how the process worked, right? Well he sat on our case with no word from him for six weeks, until Jenny called him to see what was up. He said he had been busy with other cases and that he was preparing to leave for a 3-week vacation.

So we actually got started over two months after initially calling him, when Emily was at 27 weeks. Here we sit at 35 weeks and, after going to visit the law library and talking to the counter clerk, he is just as clueless as ever. Jenny has been simply awesome and has figured out way more about the process that the lawyer has. The last straw came today when Jenny called up another lawyer who said that the adoption finalization paperwork can't be submitted until after we've had Emily for a year! This is kind of an important piece of information of which our current laywer is completely unaware!

We've made a decision. We're going with this other lawyer, who has a good amount of experience in kinship adoptions. We're going to lose some money having already paid our current lawyer nearly $1,000, some of which we hope to get back. The new process, as we understand it, seems much simpler and more streamlined, and that makes me very happy!