adoption day - it's official!

In the courtroom...Tagg was not happy
about being awake so early! But who was, really?

It’s Wednesday, November 24^th, the day before Thanksgiving. I guess everyone pretty much knows that but this year, we have more than usual to be thankful for. We finalized Sloane’s adoption this morning! It’s weird. Even though she’s been with us since she came home from the hospital in May, and the birth parents signed relinquishment 2 weeks later…we always still worry, just a little bit, that something’s going to go wrong till the judge signs the papers and makes it official. Like official-official.

Judgment? Yes. Paperwork? Done. Clip on tie? GONE!

For those who don’t know all the ins and outs of adoption, here’s what that all means. Relinquishment is when the birth parents terminate their parental rights. In most cases, in Utah anyway, the birth parents can sign relinquishment any time 24 hours after the birth. This is pretty unusual compared to most states, and Utah doesn’t require that the birth father sign anything. In our case we had to wait 10 days after because Sloane’s baby-daddy is half-Indian and there’s a whole mess of crazy stuff you have to do for that, but that’s a different discussion.

The Compton Clan

So once they sign relinquishment, the baby kind of becomes a ward of the state – the adoption agency is the guardian and we’re just sort of “practicing parents” for 6 months till the adoption can be finalized. The birth parents can’t take the baby back (in about 98% of the cases, anyway); it’s just up to the adoption agency to make sure that we’re not crackheads or using duct tape as a babysitter or anything. They do 3 home studies where they come check things out, make sure everyone is adjusting and ask a bunch of goofy questions. (We passed…whew!) 

The Harmer family (just some of them!)

So today was the big day. After waking up a little later than planned (the Blizzard of 2010 which was supposed to hit last night made for some nice icy freeway driving but wasn’t as epic as we’d feared. Roads shut down! Power outages! Food shortage! Mass hysteria! Nope…just a snowstorm that only delivered a measly 2 inches of snow.), we made it to the courthouse at 7:30a.m. Ouch. We sat in a courtroom, the lawyer asked Scott a bunch of very difficult questions like “when is your wife’s birthday?” and “what’s your wedding date?” Good thing we schooled him in the hall beforehand or he might have missed one of those! The Judge Anthony Quinn had us introduce the whole fam-damily – it was like a scene out of Parenthood. We had one whole side of the courtroom filled with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins which was really cool. Very symbolic that it’s not just me, Scott and Tagg adopting Sloane into our family, it’s the whole clan! And then it was done. Just like that…Sloane is officially ours.