May 7, 2016

A Busy Month (With Lots of Paperwork)


This past month or so has been a non stop flurry of activity on the adoption front as we tried to get our home study complete and get our profile ready.

On the home study front, we completed tons of paperwork, wrote autobiographies, got fingerprinted, had doctors appointments, took online CPR and First Aid classes, took an in person all day class on adoption, and gathered a bunch of important documents.  Then we had two visits with our social worker at our home.  She interviewed us together, then separately, checked out or home, and gave us a lot of good insight on adoption.  I think we were originally supposed to have three visits, but since we had finished all of our paperwork ahead of time, our social worker decided we could cover everything in two.  That was a big relief, we'd already taken a good chunk of time off work for other appointments and visits, I was glad we didn't need to take more.  Our social worker explained that it wasn't a pass/fail process, but that she would've brought any concerns to our attention and there weren't any.  Now we wait 2-3 weeks to get the report, and hopefully it will be final and we will be approved soon after that!

On the profile (basically a booklet all about us and our life) front, it at least sounds less complicated.  Our facilitator has people who put together the profile for us, so we just had to write the text and gather our pictures.  Much easier said than done.  As for the text, we had a guide on what to topics to cover and took a couple days to get it all written out.  Then came about 5 rounds of sending it back and forth for proofreading and edits. That took a couple weeks.  At the same time we were trying to find pictures that portrayed us and our life accurately.  I thought we had enough, but it turned out that a bunch of our pictures were too low quality to use.  Way to fail me, front facing camera on my phone, lol. So, last weekend we dusted off the good old digital camera that we hadn't used in years and ran around trying to fill in the gaps.  We also had previously scheduled a horseback trail ride for that weekend (birthday present from the Hubs that was about to expire), so we got some pretty fun pictures in. We finally submitted everything early this week.  Now we wait for a proof of the profile to make any changes we want and the approve the final version.

To sum that all up, we spent most of our nights and weekends, and a good part of our weekdays, over the last month-ish doing everything that we could do to complete our home study and profile. I might have been a little pushy about doing it all...  It felt good for once to have something that I could do to affirmatively move us forward in this journey to become parent.  Now it's all in other peoples' hands and, other than proof reading and approving a couple things, I'm not exactly sure what we do next.  For now, I have a stack of books to make my way through.  Any recommendations for adoption related books would be appreciated!