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.

Overwhelmed!

It's been a very hard week here at home with things unrelated to the adoption, so I'll preface this with saying that I know I'm both sleepy tired and life exhausted right now, so I may not be thinking - and am definitely not feeling - clearly.

We just finished up the last of our home study required training sessions. The last two were on Child Maltreatment and Sexual Abuse. I am so sick to my stomach, angry, and overwhelmed. I'm also in college to get my degree in Child Development, so I've spent the last four weeks studying everything that can go wrong in proper development at all ages due to stress and abuse in an unsafe home environment.

I'm trying to find the right word for my feeling... desperation, hopelessness... whiny?? I just want to be a mom! I can't be pregnant, and we feel like we are personally called to do what we can for our own folk before focusing on the rest of the world, thus older child adoption. Does that seriously mean that my children must be irreparably damaged? Does that mean that because I can't bear a child I have to mother children who had their innocence torn from them? That I'm going to be punished by fetal alcohol syndrome and oppositional defiance disorder and a child who falsely accuses my husband of things because she was molested when she was 2?

Maybe this isn't the way we're supposed to go.... but it's either adopt or don't have children, and we really can't face the latter yet...

Previous post addendum

Ok, so after looking at the fire safety brochure, that's not all they'll be checking. They also look to see that gas related whatsits (like lawn mowers and gas cans) aren't being stored in the house, make sure the fireplace has appropriate screens, the electrical panel is accessible, there's easy exits in case of fire, we have colorful fire exit floor plans posted on the wall, and they want 3' clearance around electrical utilities like the water heater. That last one's actually our biggest concern, because some previous owner built a little room around the water heater out in the garage and there is not 3' clearance all around it. But Bert looked at it and said it wasn't a problem.

If the Fire Marshal has a problem with something, it's not like we're a write-off... we have a chance to fix it and have Bert notify them when we're set. Still... we're ready to move on from this stage.
I don't want anything else we have to have cleared if we can avoid it.