Home Study

Family reunions, soccer, Activity days, vacation planning, getting ready for school, everyday life, minor fender-bender, and on top of it all starting our home study; which in tales a lot of paperwork collecting, paperwork organizing, home visits, a lot of emailing, driving and don't forget the 10 hours of parent training that we have to do together. I never realized how little time we have alone together until now, as we are trying to find time to do our parent training packet. Wow August has been crazy busy! This may be the reason why I have not updated this blog yet this month.

We started the month out with our first home visit. I had read a few things on what to expect and then I listened to a podcast by creating a family on the home study. They pointed out that the home visit is not so much about how your home looks so don't stress over that so much. So I made sure it was about as clean as I would normally make it when guest come over, meaning the common areas and bathrooms are clean, but the kids bedrooms are not. It's clean, but it still looks like we live here, not a model home. They are more interested in us not our home. Yes they check to make sure you have room for another child or children and that the home is a safe environment for children, but it is not the main focus of a home study. I think because it is called a "home" study people get the idea that it is all about the house. It's not! maybe if we think of it this way,  "A house is made of walls and beams, a home is where love resides, memories are created and family is forever" This is not a house study it is a home study.

In our first visit we were asked questions about our families and life growing up. Where we fell in birth order, who our siblings are, how old they are, what their occupations are, were we religious, how were we disciplined, what was and is your relationship with our parents, what traditions we had, and things like that. The second visit we got asked about our marriage, and parenting styles. how did we meet, what do we like in our spouse, how do we make decisions together, what are our values we want to teach our children, how do we discipline, what do we like to do in our spare time. Really not hard if you already have opinions on these sort of things. It is also nice to here good things about yourself coming from your spouse even if you have already heard it before. We also talked about how many children we want to adopt, about special needs we are willing to take on, ages and genders of children we want. I plan on making a post on it's own of what type of child(ren) we are hoping for.

Now that said there are a lot of other paperwork that goes into the home study to name a few: birth certificates, marriage certificates, letters from doctors, employers, and 4 references of our choosing within certain guidelines, tax return info, W-2's, and questionnaires from our massive parenting training manual. Oh and finger printing, which should get done first, because it take a while to get back. We lucked out on the finger printing cost, our police station does it for free for all city residents. It's not much anyway, but every little bit helps, right?

After we started collecting all these different things we realized we needed even more of them for the dossier so we have had to reorder things, which has added time and a little more money. I know I read this in books and on blogs before I got started, but it did not sink in. You do your home-study first, then the dossier, but you should look ahead to the dossier requirements so you only have to order some of these things once. Then when it's time to do the dossier you will have part of the paper work ready to go.

Where are we at now? We need to have a few papers notarized and mailed off, but once that is done we should only have a few more things to do before our home-study, Doctor's notes and parenting training questions. I'm hoping everything will be done for sure by the middle of September, that is in about 4 weeks. We leave for a week vacation in two weeks from today. My hope is to have it finish the week after that. We still haven't made our doctors appointments so that will take some time, depending on how fast they can get us in. I do have some scheduled for my kids, but not until the week we get back from our vacation. I'm tying it in with my kids yearly check-ups and they will not do those until just after their birthdays which are September 4th and 7th.

I also decided it was time to get my passport. Rob already has one that he renewed back in December or January, but I've never had one. I sent it in two weeks ago and they told me that I should get my birth certificate back in about two weeks and the passport in about 3-4 weeks. well I got the passport back in two weeks (Friday) and I'm still waiting for my birth certificate.

We are leaving on a vacation in two weeks that we've had planned for about a 1 1/2 years. Some might wonder why we are spending money on going to Legoland and Disneyland, when we are trying to save up for an adoption. All I can say is the vacation was in the works first, it was a way of rewarding ourselves for meeting some financial goals we had, and we will not be spending much on vacations, if anything, the next several years.

We are slowly but surely moving along. Even though we have read some upsetting or hard things about children living in orphanages and what those things may mean for us when they come home, we are still excited for this to continue. Nothing has scared us off yet, and of course we don't expect that happening.