36 Weeks

Wow! Hard to believe Full term is now less than a week away!! Only 26 days until Emily is due. Lori assured me that "all is quiet on the uterine front" right now, so we're just waiting at this point. This is where things get a little more tricky with posting fetal size! Statistically Lori's babies have been under 6 lbs, and I'm guessing the same will be true for Emily. At 36 weeks a baby is usually around 19 inches long and can weigh as much as 6 lbs...probably close to what Emily will be at 40 weeks! We'll just have to see :) All of her organs are fully developed and functioning now, though the lungs may have just a little more maturing to do. The brain continues to develop and get ready for all of the learning it will soon be doing.

We can't wait to meet our little girl (ok...we CAN wait a couple more weeks). I think we're as ready as we can be right now. We still need to buy our travel system. Mema and Papa have so nicely offered to go and pick it up for us. We have a coupon, but it has to be used in store...and I can't really buy it here and bring it to CA with me! I've got to put my coupon and a check in the mail so we can have the travel system ready when Emily gets dscharged from the hospital. So, Thank you again Mema and Papa!!! What would we do without them???!!! We're pretty much living out of our suitcases in order to make sure that we have everything we need if and when we get "the call." We're doing our best to keep the house nice and clean so we don't have to worry about doing any dishes before dashing out the door to catch a flight, lol. Of course Murphy's law states that because we're doing this Lori WILL go all the way to 40 weeks, lol. Oh well, it makes me feel better to be prepared at a minute's notice!!

In a last minute decision, we decided to fire our lawyer. After returning from our last trip to CA I got in touch with him about the progress of our background checks. After making some calls I confirmed what I had really known all along...this guy didn't know what he was doing!!!!!!! First off, he still had our finger print cards. For whatever reason...he did not send them in to the Colorado Bureau of Investigations to start our criminal background checks! He did however send off our TRAILS stuff...which we'll have to redo...more on that in a minute. I learned he didn't even KNOW we were supposed to have done an FBI background check, which takes 10-18 weeks to clear. Then, I made the decision I should have made 18 weeks ago...I called another lawyer. This time the first thing I asked was "how many adoptions have you done?" After learning that she has done adoptions for a long time we talked about the requirements for kinship adoption. Then she dropped a bombshell! I learned, and later confirmed with a document I found on the County Court website that you cannot even submit the petition for kinship adoption until you "have had physical custody of the child for one year or more!" SOOOOOOOOOOO, I don't know why our lawyer thought he would be submitting the petition immediately after Emily is born. I can't even imagine how ugly that would have been!! Turns out you have power of attorney and legal guardianship signed over and then a the one year mark, you submit your petition for adoption and everything is finalized within a month of that. Our laywer didn't know that...SO, we would not have had power of attorney or legal guardianship...we might as well have been baby sitting Emily as far as the legal system is concerned. So, we would have come home...not have been able to enroll Emily in our medical benefits, and then learned that we couldn't submit our petition for one year. I told Eric we needed to fire our Laywer ASAP. I called and told him to stop all work on our case, and that we needed a detailed list of everything he was charging us for and that we needed to meet to discuss things. We met yesterday, and he obviously knew we were letting him go. He wrote us a refund check for $200 (since we never got around to the court fees we had already paid him for). After quoting us $1000 (I thought I was even getting a discount for working with his wife!) I saw he had already prefilled in the lawyer fees on one of the documents you submit to the courts and had written in $2000!!!!!! That rat bastard was going to charge us double. The new lawyer we have who has done adoptions said her fee is $1000-$1200 by the time everything is done. So, we were paying for the time this guy was spending trying to figure out what he should have been doing...and still never learned! Anyway, he walked away with $900...easiest money he's ever made...and I hope he feels good sleeping at night knowing he rips off good honest people. I wouldn't recomend him to anyone!!!!! I'm upset we lost money to him, but at the same time I'm just happy I never have to see his face again or hear his voice when I'm calling him to ask what the heck is going on with our case. The funny thing was after revieweing the documents he gave us, he HAD printed the instructions for kinship adoption. He underlined the link detailing the need for the TRAILS background check as well as "state and FEDERAL background checks." Though he still didn't know we needed FBI? Hmm, you'd think he'd have made a guess. He underlined the entire bullet underneath where it states that the petitioner must have physical custody of the child for one year or more... but obviously didn't know. So, I guess he didn't really read the whole document...or that just wasn't clear enough for him to understand! I didn't tell him where exactly he went wrong. I would assume the chances of another kinship adoption coming his way any time soon is extrememly low...but I'm not going to do his leg work for him! I only had google.com and I learned more than he did...but obviously this was a lot more important to me than it was to him. So, unfortunately we chalk it up to a learning experience. We leave with a little less in our checking account...but a lot more knowledge about how to choose a lawyer if we ever need to again!!! Our new lawyer is great...she was able to explain everything to us and give us the timeline we so wanted to get from this last guy. She said she'd draw up the document for power of attorney and guardianship and e-mail it to me. That way, when Emily is born we only need to fill in the birth information and have Lori and Richard sign it with a notary. When Emily is about 6 months old we'll start the adoption process by completing our background checks. Yep...even though we just got cleared through TRAILS...that'll expire before we can submit to the court so we have to repeat it. We'll complete our CBI and FBI finger print criminal background checks and also do our homestudy. It'll be a modified homestudy, but our new lawyer says that they never completely waive it. No biggie. Then, when Emily is one year old we will submit all of our paperwork to the court and the lawyer will request a court date on the next docket. It's a closed hearing, so we can invite the people who we would want to be there to come. She said it takes about 15 minutes, and then the adoption is finalized then and there. We'll recieve all of our official documents there and can then celebrate the adoption being final!!

Well that's it. It has been a busy and somewhat stressful week, but I think everything is ok now. I'm relieved to know this is all going to be done right!! :)

Now I can just sit back and wait for the arrival of my daughter!