We’ve completed our first home study visit!! For those that don’t know, the home study is basically a report about the family and the home which is used to determine if you will be allowed to adopt. It starts with paperwork – birth certificates, marriage certificate, child abuse background checks for every state you’ve live in within the past ten years or so, a financial statement about our situation, doctor’s letters stating you’re healthy, etc.
Then, your social worker comes to your house to check it out and make sure you really know what you are trying to get yourself into. We talked about the training we completed (10 required hours of training to adopt, but our agency wanted 12), our parenting styles, what Carter is like, how we met, what our marriage is like, and more and more and more. She was here for 3 hours and that wasn’t enough time so, we’ll be meeting again in a couple of weeks.
Our social worker is really nice and really on tops of things! She gets that we want to move as quickly as possible to get on the wait list! The biggest hold up on everything is that in order to complete the home study, we have to have the results of our FBI fingerprinting which we sent in about 2 weeks ago. The fingerprinting results are currently taking 8-10 WEEKS! So, hopefully, we’ll have the home study report done and approved by both our social worker’s agency and our adoption agency and ready to be in the mail the minute that the results come back.
From there, we do our USCIS stuff which is needed to complete our dossier. I’ll go into more detail about those items when we get there.
For now, our home study is under way!
I remember our first home study with our first adoption. I had talked to Paul's aunt who adopted way back in the day ;o) She said they went through the cupboards and everything. I spent the week before rearranging EVERYTHING inside and out. I didn't sleep until 3 that morning then was up at 7 or 8. The social worker almost forgot to walk through the house!! There was nothing to worry about, I think that is as close to morning sickness that I've ever been! Waiting is SO hard! Hang in there.. its like a roller coaster full of hurry up and wait!