Adopting my non-bio ds

[Impatience]

We're about to start the procedings for me (non-bio mum) to adopt our 18month ds. We have our civil partnership.

From what I've seen on various forums, it looks like dp (bio mum) has to essentially give ds up for adoption, and we then adopt him as a couple. This seems to be what happens in step-child adoptions. Have I got this right? If I have got this right, does it make any difference that we were together (and had been for ages) when ds was conceived, that it was a joint project, rather than me joining a pre-existing family of mother and child. In effect it's the same as if a hetero couple conceived through donor insemination, yet I don't expect they don't have to got through these proceedings. (I'm sure they tend to skirt the issue by lying on the birth certificate.)

Anyway, I'm not complaining about the way things seem to be, but I want to clarify whether I've got the right end of the stick. Because we conceived ds together it seems to me that there might possibly be differences between my adoption of ds and that by a new partner joining a family.

SO what I'm finally getting round to asking is: Have I understood this right? Who's done this, and how did it feel to the bio mum if she really did have to adopt her own child? And do I really need to stress too much about the state of the house when the lady from the adoption team makes her first visit on Monday?!

Oh wow, that does sound easy. I'm glad I asked - and glad I haven't blown three grand on a solicitor!

Well, after all this time, here we are again with an update. We finally had our first meeting with our lady from the local adoption team today. She was lovely, and was just meeting us to tell us what would happen and I think probably to get a bit of a feel about the situation and us.

She will have meetings with each of us (dp and me) to talk about ourselves, our families and backgrounds etc, our relationships with eachother and with ds, and to fill out CRB forms. We have appointments for this next week, which is nicely close. If ds were older she would also talk to him, and he would be appointed a guardian of ... (something I couldn't catch), basically someone who is his representative and will second the assessments made of him (if necessary). She said this comes into its own where there is some contention about who the child should go with, or if things don't seem right. Someone will also interview our donor, as they would any biological father, to make sure that he's aware that I'm trying to adopt ds and that he's happy with that.

On the basis of all this info she'll file a court report. The courts will then get in touch with us and ask us to fill in the forms that I filled in months ago (Impatience is my name!). There will then be 3 court dates. The first two are 'direction' meetings, where they just decide what will happen next. If everything is straightforward (which ours really should be) these can pass quite quickly. We are allowed to go to these but from what she said there isn't really any need. The third date is the big one where I become ds's legal parent. I can't wait. After that court date the paperwork can take 6-8 weeks to come through, but he and I are legally eachother's from the court date.

She said step-parent adoptions where there are no problems can take about 20 weeks, and then she said it should all be through by the end of the year which seems a long way off to me! But it's under way, and we're having our meetings next week so perhaps it will be faster than that. (Impatience impatience impatience.)

Good old dp will ammend anything I've misreported I am sure!

Hope you're all well x

PS, Shan, have you got your court date yet?

guardian ad litem

x

Update again for anyone who might be interested - had first social worker interview (with me, bio-mum) and it was fine. Just a chat, asked what kind of child DS is, basics about me (age, education, where born, health, likes), signed forms for CRB and permission for them to search my background with NSPCC etc. Then some stuff on how DS came to be - i.e. my 'relationship' with donor. Nothing on parenting, or on my relationship with DP, which I was a bit surprised about. Felt like it was kind of an easy one for the SW really, low stress for her compared to some other work. DP next, then prob a phone call to donor.
Feels weird that DS will then technically be adopted, and have an adoption certificate (though we're keeping his birth cert). But great to think that within the year he should be ours with no quibbles.
Only thing is its made me think we really need to sort out guardians for if we die, which i just hate trying to think about and avoid at all costs.

Well that is encouraging-ridiculous that there were no parenting discussions though-but hey,if it is only a matter of paper pushing then dp and I will go for it!
Good luck and thank you for the update.

Thanks for the update, kayjayel. I'm looking forward to our celebration when it finally comes through - cyber-cake and champagne all round

next update: I had my meeting with the social worker this morning. She wanted to know about my relationships with dp, ds, parents and siblings, about my thoughts about ds's contact with our donor and how we would talk to him about his atypical situation, and then she really threw me by asking for my likes and dislikes.

There was nothing taxing. Shes going to use this info (and that from dp from Monday, and from when she chats to our donor) to write the court report. We get to see the report before it's filed and can add to it or cut bits out as we wish. That is reassuring, because it's a strange feeling to be judged on something so important on the basis of an hour interview. And I've already thought up a load more likes and dislikes that actually represent me rather than the drivel I thought on the spot!

She also took our completed CRB checks, and I divulged my caution and described the oh-so-minor offense. She mentioned to dp on Monday that everything should be declared because otherwise it could come across as dishonesty, which isn't great. However, I was never prompted, and the CRB form doesn't ask about cautions so it would have been very easy for me to have not mentioned it, except for dp suggesting that I did. So I'm just warning any one else who's got any legal skeletons to 'fess up!

We have another meeting with her in a couple of weeks to check the report and forms and that everything's going ok. Shall keep you posted x

We had our 4th meeting with social worker yesterday. She just wanted to get a few more details for the court report. I expect I'm all suspicious, but she had said to me at the last meeting that she would like to see both of us, and suggested that ds also be there, so I think she wanted to get a good feel for how he was. Luckily - despite troublesome teeth and lack of sleep - he was on good form and interacted entirely appropriately. Phew!

I feel that she's on our side, and wants to get the court report worded to the best of our advantage.

She's coming back in 3 weeks, and if there are no problems we'll be sending all the forms off to the courts.

She said she probably won't need to talk to our donor after all. This is turning out to be easier than I thought, so far... Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Sounds like good news-best of luck and please keep us updated as I think we are going to go down the saem route despite dp having pr for dd.

I shall do Whooosh. It might not be the most exciting read but hopefully it's all the more reassuring for that!

Didn't realise that dp was going to have to give our child up for adoption before i could adopt them back, sounds a bit silly dosn't it! we then have to explain to our dc at a later date why he has adoption papers! could get a little messy if not explained right
Sounds like it might be slightly easier as we have just been through our CP
Hope it goes nice and smoothly for the last stage Good luck

soontobe - this isn't the case for us - me having to give up rights. Our SW said I didn't have to give in birth cert so I keep it, but DS does become 'adopted', but its a step-parent adoption (with CP), not the old style give-him-up-then-adopt process. Have you been told you have to give child up for adoption first? I think its a change since CP has come in, so hopefully you don't have to either.
x

Sorry to join this thread late but I'm just starting this process (partner who is nonbio mum adopting our son. no known donor though) and I'd love to hear how it's going - if anyone has done/is doing it. Do we need to use solicitors? Or do we go straight to local council adoption team, or what? We have parental responsibility sorted already but want the longer term/full parental rights too. Thanks!

Hi, we're in this process at the moment. We just wrote to the local adoption team saying we wished to pursue a step-parent adoption for DP. They then contacted us and assigned a SW and then we had some meetings, more chats really, then she wrote a report and has now sent it to the court. When the report was ready we could send in our form to the court. If you phone the courts and ask for a step parent adoption form they should send it out to you. Now what should happen is that the court get our application to adopt DS and they also then have the social worker report and we then go to court.

It has been fairly easy so far, but takes ages. We wrote to SW team in January, started seeing them around March, I think (dates are probably below), she finished the report in July and we're unlikely to be in court before the end of the year. The interviews really weren't very invasive at all, nothing like a proper adoption thing. We did clean the house for each meeting, but she didn't look at house safety, though she commented in report that DS had a visible 'presence' in house - i.e. toys and photos around. If your child is older they might interview him, but they didn't with DS (he was 16 mths when we started)

No need for a solicitor, I don't think. We haven't bothered and they charge so much. Should be really easy if you have anon donor. HTH

Good luck with the adoption and congrats on your family!

xx

Thanks so much! We've now initiated the process by calling our SS team - now for another few months wait!

Fantastic - good luck with it all!

Hiya, we had our first hearing last week. Richmond Magistrates' Court sent it up to High Holborn because they hadn't delat with an iternational situation before (DP's brother is our donor and lives in BElgium). GREAT judge who raised his eyebrows at Richmond, said it sounded like a "very straightforward case", apologised to DP personally for the time it was taking, and gave us a date in December for the last hearing and "swearing in"! (They are very busy at HH). Two social workers have been WONDERFUL. All in all, we have had a great experience witht his journey and are really looking forward to a huge party in December!

Because we used a known donor do you think that we will need a solicitor?
We have it all verbally agreed.
I'm glad to hear that you are all getting along nicely with your sw but i'm a little concerned about how the sw down here might feel about it as when we were going down the adoption route before we found a donor we had a hello meeting with a sw from plymouth and she was absolutley against it -she didn't say this but you could tell from her body language- she didn't think that we would be able to get a newborn or a healthy older child but we were more than welcome to look at sibling groups or children with disabilities, not that we were particularily minded we just wanted a family.
Any way i have strayed from the original question. Has any body gone through this process in Devon or cornwall?

when my mom had my sister she remarried to my dad she had to adopt my sister with my dad (she wanted us all to have the same surname) my mom didnt seem to bothered by it but it was a long time ago before i was born

Oh Shan that's fantastic news! Congratulations to all of you!

Today we got our appointment through for our first hearing in a fortnight. Our SW told us they are boring and usually involve lots of hanging around and they might not even need us there, but I'm still incredibly excited. It means we're actually making progress, and it's come round a bit quicker than we expected. (For newcomers, I'm kayjayel's partner.)

Soontobe, do you mean the SW was against it because you're gay? With any luck you'll get a different SW this time. Our's has been completely fine with us being a gay couple, and Shan's story seem to show the same. They aren't all philistines! As for the donor, our SW hasn't even questioned him. She took our word for it that it was all ok! She wanted to keep things simple. (I'm half expecting the judge to request some discussion with him, but our donor will be happy to do so.) Even if your authority decides to make an evaluation regarding him, a couple of interviews should do it, and if he's happy for the adoption to go ahead there really shouldn't be a problem.

Meanandmy: that's how it used to be, because adoptions could only be made to couples. So for the new man to adopt his partner's children he could only do that as a couple with the mother, which means the mother had to adopt them too. Crazy! (And because gay couples couldn't legally register their relationship they could neither adopt as a couple nor as single people.)

Crikey, anyone would think I didn't have an awful lot of work to do! Good luck soontobe and cockles. Let us know how you get on! And Shan, do come in and let us know when you're all legal: Any excuse for a drink

Yaaaay! Our final hearing is on Monday! Very excited xxx

DP became Stella's legal mother today! The judge announced his decision in a matter of a couple of minutes, despite the journey here having been somewhat chaotic no specific forms of consent for a Civil Partnership exist (they tried to make me sign an old form giving up all my parental rights of biological mother, I absolutely refused!) and very little precedent for cases in which the male donor resides overseas...
Needless to say, we are over the moon... Just wanted to share,
xxx

Huge congratulations Shan! Did you have a celebration?

We're waiting ours in the next few weeks. As we feared/predicted the SW leaving out details on our donor was picked up on resulting in last minute panics about whether everything will be delayed. We're hopeful it has been sorted out but they all have a hearing this Friday to check the paperwork, and if all goes well then we have a kind of celebratory official adoption thing on 14th. Still a bit nerve wracking. We can't wait to have the security.

Congratulations again!

Glad to see so many others getting on well with this! So far, we've had several interviews with social worker, who seems rather inept but not at all hostile. Every document refers to us adopting a child 'in the care of xxcouncil social services' which is odd; it feels rather as if they are making it up as they go along. We'll see! No idea when court stuff will come along.