We finally have an update that we can publicly post. Some more personal details were available in a private Facebook group that some of you joined if we knew you personally, because we couldn’t be too careful with the information.
The news is: the bio/legal father’s rights have been terminated by the court! For the first time, inexplicably, he was a no-show and was summarily terminated without recourse because there are precious few excuses for missing that summons. Since he doesn’t have a leg to stand on to appeal the decision, the agency is going to officially terminate the mother’s rights, which she signed away at birth, so she also won’t have any grounds to appeal.
Parker is growing like crazy and it seems like he learns something new every day. He went from scooting to crawling to pulling to standing position to assisted walking within the span of 3 weeks and just turned 9 months old. He’s also got 8 or 10 teeth (he hates anyone trying to check) and a mop of that red hair that gets comments every time we go out.
The boys share a room now and have lots of fun playing together. More updates as our paperwork proceeds, but it’s going to be at least 60 days, if not 90+ days.
Some backstory from between updates
We’ve been through another rough patch with this adoption. Our previous one out of foster care took months of building a case, trial, and then a full year of waiting through appeal because the court didn’t transcribe the hearing for 6 or 7 months! With this, they built the case of abandonment up for 9 months (he was one day shy of turning 9mo with this hearing) to really pile the offense up high. He’d been to Tampa on at least two occasions for court and didn’t ask to see him, Skype him, and certainly didn’t financially support his upkeep for all that time, which under statutes is abandonment.
We were updated every week with a call with our case manager, but some weeks were just, “No updates here… do you have any questions?” Other weeks were full of questions from documents from the case discovery on the legal father that had us waffling between it sounding like good news and bad news. We kept everything to ourselves because we didn’t want to risk word spreading to someone who could piece together who this was about and change the outcome, so that was also stressful to bear all the weight for 7 months.
We’ve received disclosures on his hospital stay up until we picked him up for discharge, parental medical histories as best they could gather, and the interrogatory that was partially filled out by the legal father to the law firm. So, we have some info to go on for telling him when he’s older, but not as much as we have from our earlier adoption.
Well, that’s about it for now. Next update will be about having a date set.
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