Well we decided to move along toward our foster license. Our hope is to take only legal risk placements. Legal risk placements are usually when there is a very good chance the child will come up for adoption but it is not 100%. They can only place children in a "straight adopt" home when they are 100% free. DFPS is now wanting to move children sooner & sooner. So now when a child has a TPR (termination of parental rights), they immediately move that child into a foster to adopt home if their current foster parents choose not to adopt them. Though their parental rights have been terminated there is still a 90 day grace period for appeal, or for an alternate family member to come forward for the child. Previously they would let the child remain in the foster home until they were 100% free & THEN move then to a "straight adopt" home. There are a few good things about this situation, the first is we could end up with a much younger child. For example, our son was taken at birth, & had TPR done when he was 19 months old. By the time he came home to us, he was 28 months. Had we been willing to foster to adopt, or accept legal risk placements, he would have been home 9 months sooner. The other good thing about doing legal risk, or fostering is that we could get a placement faster. There are more kids waiting for foster families than straight adopt homes. The downside to the whole situation is that risk that the child will not stay. In order to get our foster license we had to get a fire inspection & take another training class. We got our fire inspection last week & are scheduled to complete our last training class the 2nd week in November. We are hoping to have our home study go to committee the first week or two of November.
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