My friend just adopted 2 kids from the foster system. She lives in MO and adopted 2 teens. It took just over a year to complete the process.
She began by filling out her application and going through numerous screening processes. In my state, you are able to decide which children you are willing to foster, so she was able to state ahead of time that she was only looking to foster children who would be adoptable. Next they notified her as children or sibling groups became available.
She has had to go to court MANY times over that year. Every time a contact with the parent needs to be made, they go to court. Once parental rights were terminated, the court visits became much less frequent--however, they did need to go to court to state they planned to adopt and then went to court again in order to actually adopt.
The final info you'll need is that she never needed a personal lawyer in the process. Since she adopted through the Division of Family Services (DFS), she had a caseworker and the kids had a caseworker. Anything that needed to be done was handled by the caseworkers.
The attitude of the caseworkers wasn't really forthcoming--they just wanted to get kids through the system as quickly as possible. I don't want to make it sound like they didn't care about the kids--my friend had already checked out--but they just wanted to process everything quickly (even if it meant leaving info out that a parent might want to know.)
Okay, now to make it apply to you. I'm not sure how you would get around the system, but it would be easy to make the system work for you. They want kids to go to a good home quickly. They want the home situations to work for the kids so they won't have to be moved again. As far as "foundlings" go (making assumptions here), the only snag would be the parental rights issue. That might take months or years to clear up, depending on state laws which you can conveniently write.
Elisabeth
