@lirio, thank you so much for your thoughts. Yes, she you’re correct that she’s elderly; it’s pretty remarkable how well she has done to take care of him for so long (and somewhat interesting to me that she was able to adopt him at the age she was when he first went into kinship care or however exactly it went). You are right, he needs to be involved in these decision(s) as much as possible. Feelings of abandonment are very traumatic and we do have to be very careful to make sure he has a voice and feels heard. It’s really challenging to find stories of adoptions in situations similar to this particular situation, but I continue to search for a “template” to follow for doing something like the transition you’re describing–he’d probably live with us and see G-Gma once a day for awhile or something like that. Maybe she could still pick him up after school for awhile or something. Anyway, thanks again for speaking up & giving me a sounding board here.