From Newborn Adoption: The First Week:

7. Prepare for lots of contact with the adoption agency.

After I took physical custody of my son at two days old, I was in seemingly constant contact with the adoption agency. We were trying to work through the legal requirements for the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) for both his birth state and our home state. Additionally, we had to schedule visits with the social worker.

If you decide to accept an immediate placement (where you take physical custody of the baby before the placing mother’s parental rights terminate), then you will be the baby’s physical guardian in the capacity of a foster parent. (Our adoption agency called this a direct placement.) In the State of Georgia, the social worker visited with us a couple of times to make sure the placement was working out. I was nervous about these visits, but I was frankly too physically tired to put a lot of energy into worrying about them.

Those visits were actually fun because I got to show off the baby. The social worker just needed to see that the baby looked healthy and safe. These visits were very low key compared to the home visit during the home study. In my case, I was staying at a friend’s house, so I felt no pressure to make sure the house would pass a “white glove” test.

In addition to these visits, there were many phone calls and faxes going back and forth. (Thank goodness, my friend had a fax machine.) Each time the phone rang, there was the possibility that the agency was calling to say that the placing mother had decided to parent. That was stressful, but I had to push through those fears and trust that everything would work out for the best, whether that meant that the placing mother or I would be this baby’s forever mother.

Most parenting books advise a new mother to get lots of rest and to sleep when the baby sleeps, but that was hard to do, thanks to the constant contact with the adoption agency. There is a lot of paperwork involved in adoption, and a lot of that paperwork was shuffled during my child’s first week of life.

Related Topic:

ICPC and Going Home