It's Official

Yesterday was a big day for our family. We went to court to have Carson's adoption finalized. In Utah, you have to wait six months before the court will finalize anything. During that time, the adoptive family is required to have two in-home visits with the social worker to asses how everything is going. And the agency has to do everything it can to find a birth parent if they haven't signed anything yet. In our case, the birth father never signed. Then we all go to court with our lawyer and the social worker. The lawyer asked the social worker a bunch a questions about the home studies and what had been done to locate the birth father. Then the lawyer asked us a bunch of questions and the judge read all the paper work. Then the judge signed the official adoption decree, which we took to the clerks office to get a birth certificate re-issued for him. This process signs away the birth father's parental rights as well. It was very exciting! For some reason I was really stressed, but it was so easy. Here are some pictures with the judge and our social worker.