Home Study Interviews

We had our home study interviews last Thursday and Friday. They went really well. Our social worker, Rhonda, was great. She was very easy to talk to. We had our individual interviews on Thursday and then a joint interview on Friday. During the individual interview, I went ahead and confessed that talking about my feelings and emotions wasn't exactly my strong suit. She seemed to get a kick out of that. She would tell me when we were done with questions about feelings for awhile. There was a finance piece in the interviews that I was all over!

A few minutes after Rhonda got to our house on Thursday, Brennan asked her if she wanted to see his room. Brennan proceeded to give her a tour of the whole house, basement included. It was pretty funny. Later she asked Brennan a few questions to see what he thought about us adopting. One of the question she asked him was how he would feel if his new brother or sister got into all his stuff. Brennan sort of chuckled while answering and said something to the effect of "oh that's ok, Sawyer already does that". It was pretty hilarious.

Hopefully in another 3-4 weeks we'll have our homestudy finalized and be ready to submit our dossier to AGCI and officially be on the waiting list.

We have an appointment at 8:00 AM this Tuesday in Hammond, IN to be fingerprinted for the Dept of Homeland Security. It has something to do with us getting pre-approved to bring an adopted child into the country. I think that's the last criminal/background check we have to get through.

Overdue Adoption Update

Fortunately, the delay in posting an update on our adoption process does not mean there was a delay in getting things done on our to-do list. One thing that should be sufficiently clear at the end of this process is that we are not criminals. We've submitted several different criminal background checks for the home study and dossier (local & national). We had to go over to South Bend to be fingerprinted at an Indiana State Police post. Hopefully soon the USCIS (Dept of Homeland Security) will be sending us an appointment to go somewhere else and be fingerprinted.

Home Study - We have submitted everything on our list for the home study agency, and our social worker called us today to schedule our home study interviews (09/18 & 09/19). She's going to interview us and JB & Carla on those days. Once we get through the interviews, I believe the agency will be able to get our home study written up. When that is done it will go into our dossier.

Dossier - The only significant item we have left to complete for the dossier (besides the written home study report) is our Statement of Reason to Adopt letter. It's partially written but we need to finish that up. Otherwise we just need to take a few pictures of our house and ourselves to include.

We also have a ten hour online educational thing to get through and a big workbook to fill out. We're 1/10 of the way through the online stuff and about 1/2 way through the workbook.

So, I think things are in pretty good shape. Once we submit our completed dossier, we'll be on the waiting list for a referral.