During pre-adoptive placement, there will be cwr visits, and if you're with an agency, they should visit too. They're there to make sure it's going to work out, smooth out any rough spots (be surprised if there aren't any) and get you help if you need it (therapy or whatever).
Ours was not really by the book, so I'm not totally sure on the amount of visits required. We were told that the caseworker would visit once a month (nope) and the agency's adoption placement person would visit say every 2 weeks and then once a month and then at longer intervals (if everything was going ok). That didn't happen either. Didn't have anyone visit (shhhh, don't tell anyone! haha). That's probably because we WERE the kids fosterhome and our agency worker was on maternity leave.
As far as you doing what you want, yes, cut their hair, make the rules, whatever. When we had ours as foster, their parental rights were already terminated (very, very low risk) so we didn't do bio visits or have to ask anyone anything...except if we took them out of the county for more than 72 hours. Hmm...don't know if that travel rule still applied during our pre-adoptive period (we had 2 months, but that was because we wanted to wait for national adoption day...they do a HUGE celebration in Tarrant Cnty).
We found pre-placement time to be a grey zone. No one really knew what was going on. We had one that had an ER visit and are still working on medicaid paying that (pre-adopt changes their last name). Their birthcert. have birthnames, but placement gives you some rights to change that at schools (but not SS). Just red tape, confusion.
And yes, it's minimum 6 months from placement to finalization (they call it consumation).
Lawyer. CPS took care of that because we were doing national adoption day (at least assigning us one). They have a list of lawyers that work with them. All we paid upfront was the filing fees (lawyer worked pro-bono (sp?)) and birth certificate fee (about $300? for one) was just a little more for us (3 birthcert.). Cost depends on where the kids are at though (if we did ours here in houston, we'd pay to transfer it...so, we did it up there).
It's late, I'm tired, so I really hope that makes some sense! LOL I found a few sentences that didn't make it on the screen the way my brain said, so ???
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