My daughter is 5, and has been raised by my husband since right after her first birthday. she does not know her bio father, he has only seen her twice, once when she was about 3 months old, and again when she was about 15 months old(-and that was only bc his mother pretty much made him. )
Anyways, she calls him daddy and now we are making it official by him adopting her. She doesn't know anything about it, we aren't sure that she'd be able to understand what is going on, since nothing will change for her, no one will leave, no one new will be moving in, etc.
We have paid about $2,000 for our attorney & guardian ad litem (our state requires this- it's a court appointed person-usually a lawyer- who is only to represent the interest of the child, not either side of the parents) This is for an uncontested adoption (the bio-"sperm donor" in our case
voluntarily signed over his rights) which means he no longer has to pay the little bit of child support any more, no insurance, no visitation/custody ever, etc. you can then change your child's name if you want to (which you can't do without bio's consent anyways-at least not here in SC) and the step parent can then have full legal rights, if you were to ever seperate, they would have rights to custody, vistation, child support, etc, the step parent will also now be listed on the child's birth certificate as the father.
We just had a visit with the guardian (kinda like a social worker & they have to visit your home, make sure you have an adequate place to live, food, clothes, etc,) they also have to do a criminal record check on my husband, as well as a financial check. It's pretty much like you are adopting a whole new child as if you having already been raising them this way their whole life.
We are now waiting for our court hearing to be scheduled. so far it's been 10 months in the actual process, but about 3 of those were waiting to figure out that i needed to hire a lawyer bc I couldn't get through the process without one, and another 3 were waiting for the bio-father to take his sweet time to sign over his rights. (*funny* during this time i ran into him during a visit home-MASS-where he still lives- and he tried to buy me a drink and didn't have enough money to do so!
that really made me laugh- considering he is such a loser and definitely wasn't broke bc he paid alot of child support!)
Also, I good point: to try to help speed up the process- we offered to bio-father that he could stop paying support as soon as he signed the papers and any arrearage would be erased, rather than him waiting until the adoption was finalized for support to stop, and still having to pay back all he owed from the past if he contested. (as the laws here state)
sorry so long, hope this helps, i'm new here!