[hkolln]

Hi everyone. I am new here so bear with me as I don't know much about the adoption process and I have a ton of questions.

We found out last week our 6 yr old niece is currently in foster care in Idaho (we live in Florida). Her mother is in prison for drug possession and received a 4 yr sentence and probably won't be release for awhile as she already has skipped out before on other charges. The foster system in Idaho is working on terminating her rights to her daughter. When we found out last week my husband, the great guy he is, spent 2 days tracking down the social worker on our nieces case. In the process we found out terrible things about our nieces condition and how she has been abused. It is so sad I can't type it her.

The thing is we wish to take her in and adopt her. The social worker is starting the interstate thing where they transfer her case to Florida and they do the case study, etc...but in the meantime our niece sits in the system which sucks! All we want is for her to have the love and stability she so deserves. We know there is hope and we want to help her so badly.

We have to attend a 10 wk MAPP class here and do a case study which could take months...I don't want our niece sitting in another home but we were told she may have to. Isn't there a program, since we are family, to expedite this process? I'm not sure if we need to contact an attorney as of yet or not? Has anyone done a relative adoption like this between states while the child is in the foster system?

I'm so worried about her welfare. I want her to be safe and feel loved and I feel like it's gonna take forever!!

Does anyone have an advice on our situation?

Thanks!