Readoption Frustrates me!

Please excuse my rant, but it's well earned :).

We have been home with our son Elias for about a year and a half now and still have not completed our readoption, but not from lack of trying. In our state, you have to wait six months to file, so we did. Right before the six month mark we contacted our social worker from our homestudy agency to start the process. At this point we found out that our county is one of the few in the state that requires we do a full adoption instead of a recognition of a foreign decree, which is much longer and more expensive...joy.

While getting the proper documents filled out, we found that our social worker was basically forging our signatures on paperwork because she was too lazy to get our signatures herself. She also sent us documents that belong to other people with all of their personal info. on it. It's a good thing we aren't into identity theft. When we contacted our agency about this, they said that this was "common practice" and refused to see our concerns. We didn't feel like the social worker was trying to be purposefully unethical, but when you are working with people's personal information and legal documents, you need to be more careful. We had only suggested that they retrain her, but the agency took great offense to our concern and basically sent us back our money and closed our file (they also let our homestudy expire after we had asked to do the paperwork to keep it active, but they "didn't get to it in time" despite us asking several times).

They did send us our paperwork for the readoption with our refund (it was very strange to us how they seemed to panic when we raised our concerns). So this put us back quite awhile on our readoption. We finally submitted our paperwork to our county at around the 11th month mark. So we waited and waited for a court date. We still have not received a court date over 7 months later. One month ago we learned the courts had lost our paperwork, but when pressured, they found it, but we still don't have a court date. We were hoping they would speed up our file after they lost our paperwork, but that isn't how they roll I guess.

We are hoping to have our readoption done before Christmas at this point, but it's been a wild ride that we would like to see end. Who knew this would be the most difficult part of our adoption!