Homestudy Approval Meeting Tomorrow

We're driving up to Bethany tomorrow to meet with Bert at 2:30. The homestudy's been signed off by the Director, and we have to read through it carefully to make sure it's all accurate and things cast in the particular lights that we feel are appropriate. We'll be bringing her a few more photos to add in, and we'll also be discussing our time line for the next part of the plan. As soon as I know it, I'll share it.

I love my friends, and how they're all so amazingly supportive through all of this craziness. I've been spending time here and there looking through photolistings and getting discouraged because of how few children are listed as available who we feel could fit our family. I've been discouraged enough that we've already started discussing our alternatives. I mentioned this to one of my best friends last night and she said, "Well, you wouldn't be able to do anything about it until Friday, right? So they wouldn't be there yet." Her point was basically, when we're ready, God'll put our children's info right where it needs to be. She was so totally right. I'm so grateful that God's given us friends to help us keep perspective.

More news tomorrow!

A month later...

Wow. My last post was the 16th of March, and here it is the 17th of April. But there's good news! Bert took two days last week to focus on our homestudy, one of which she worked from her home office so as to avoid distractions. While going through our file, she did find questions she wanted to ask, something that was marked off as received but had NY information, and discovered that she hadn't received a recommendation from one source and that our physical exams were soon to expire.

So yesterday we went in to the doctor's office and got our physicals done again (3rd time's the charm?), and the recommendation is currently in progress (the person writing it IMed us mid-writing, so we know). As of this moment the homestudy is 99% complete; as soon as these items get to the office and she plugs in the text, we're ready to roll!!

What's next? When it's ready, we drive to the agency office, read it over and make any corrections or changes, and she'll work through a timeline with us. I have no idea what this timeline looks like yet, but we'll let you know.

Homestudy Writing Update

Well, three weeks will be up on Friday (tomorrow), but Bert's just starting to work on our stuff today. So it'll be another 2 to 3 weeks. It's okay, I'm disappointed but not upset, because she had very good reasons. She transferred and settled 5 (not 3) kids from California to Myrtle Beach, and a baby involved in one of her client's cases was born unexpectedly and needed placement, and that was out of her immediate area as well, so she was on the road a lot as well as just dealing with the normal caseload fpr both cases. We'd known about the CA kids and there's nothing to be done about an unexpected birth, so it's all good. I am, however, looking forward to getting her first clarification phone call. She warned us that when she writes these things, she works from home and the moment she comes across something she needs to check with us, she calls... no making lists and calling later, she'll just ring us up at any strange time she may be writing. So once we get one of those calls we'll know she's getting things done.

I've received some confused questions about what's going on now (working on the homestudy) as opposed to what we've been doing over the last year (working on the homestudy). So here's a clarification that those of you involved in adoption already can just skim over or skip to the end as you wish.

Over the last year (and some, see the ticker on the side of the blog) we've been working on completing a number of documents. This is us "working on the homestudy". All of these documents go into our file and once they're all completed, Bert will take them and write them into a combination of narrative and general information that can be presented as a whole to the social workers representing our potential children. This is her "working on the homestudy", which is happening right now.

So if we decide we want to parent Jenny (no, there's no "Jenny" yet), Jenny's social worker will receive a little book about us from Bert. That book is what she's writing. Some homestudies are just a few sheets of paper and some are doctoral-thesis-length; Bert likes to be as thorough as possible without being so overwhelming that the other social worker won't read it. I can't remember exactly, but I have the idea that she aims for 10-15 pages.

Our homestudy will contain:

• a cover sheet (profile page) that's a very brief 'who we are and who we're looking for'
• more detailed narrative on our past, marriage, families, current lifestyle, future aspirations; basically All About Us (as understood by Bert)
• details of the kind of children we're looking for and why (if appropriate)
  
• recommendation letters gathered from friends and family, with explanations of comments if necessary
• results of our physicals
• results of our background checks
• results of our inspections
  

When it's ready, we will drive up to Columbia and read through every word. We'll discuss with her if we think something is incorrect or could be worded differently, and then she'll make changes and run off a final draft. And then we're ready to roll.

So there's the description of the homestudy process in a nutshell, or at least in the shell surrounding our particular nut. I know that every state and every agency does things in slightly different ways, but from what I've learned from talking to people this is a pretty good representation of the concept. I hope it's cleared things up a bit for everyone.

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The only other matter was that of the kitchen fire extinguisher. Yes, there are multiple kinds of extinguishers! Here's a picture, ruthlessly pillaged from the internet and edited by me:

Apparently they put out different kinds of fires. The smaller one does mostly just stove fires, but the second one we bought does stove fires (kitchen), wood type fuels (fireplace), and live electrical wires. In any case, we're all set and ready and everyone who needs a photo of our lovely mounted-under-the-counter extinguisher has been appeased.

And I think that's it for now! We'll keep on keeping everyone posted as we start hearing from Bert as she writes.

Fire Inspection Complete!

Bert met the Fire Marshal at McDonald's off of the highway exit, grabbed some coffee, and were on our doorstep pretty much right at 9:00 this morning. He measured the kid's bedroom window, investigated (looked at) the optional kid's bedroom window to assess it was the same as the first, tested every smoke detector, and then put lots of stuff in his laptop. The only hitch is that we apparently bought the wrong kind of fire extinguisher; we got one traditionally found in a home kitchen, and we needed the next (enormous) size up with a hose on it like you see in schools. We're going to replace this one, take a digital photo of the new one, and email it to him so that he can see that it's there and then we're good to go. Ain't technology grand? And, as seemed to happen last time, he didn't look at the things we had concerns about.

So. The next step is Bert's actual creation of the official homestudy document that we will hand 'round about. She said it will take 2-3 weeks, because she's wrapping up three of her assigned kids moving here from California this week and next. So in 3 weeks we'll be starting the search! Bert explained that we work from the internet photolistings (such as are listed in the sidebar) and word of mouth, so as soon as we're "Homestudy Ready" we'll be on a mission to get the word out about us to everyone we know. I may also either change the format of this blog, or put up another website for the sake of having a URL to hand around to friends and family.

Keep watching this space!

This morning

As anticipated, I'm much better after having had a night's sleep. Lanse was also very wonderful in letting me cry and vent, speaking some rationality into whatever brain I had left at the time, and praying with me. While we're always taking our feelings and thoughts under advisement, no changes are being made right now, which is good. And we're done with training for a small bit, which is also good... and I'm focusing on teenagers this week for school, which we're not adopting, so that's also good. I have to find a small mental vacation somehow. But overall, it's all good. For the moment.