The Home Study

I haven't talked about it lately, so here we go!  Our adoption process...  Today was the "dreaded" home visit day.


Surprisingly, it was not as bad as I had thought.  Our Social Worker (SW) didn't seem too worried about the house.  She said "very nice" or "this is great" at every room.  I'm not sure whether that's a good thing, but I'm going to say it is. Lol!  We still have some work to do, but I spent all 10 hours that Cam was at work yesterday working on getting the house cleaned up.  And I do have to say I'm pretty proud of myself.  It looks great.  I had a little help from a WONDERFUL friend that I am so uuber thankful for.  Even the three hours she helped me, just got me to focus on a few things and kept me motivated.  I even cooked 8 dozen cookies while I was at it.  Ya know, at 1AM, that's normal, right? :)

The majority of our home visit consisted of the SW asking us questions...kind of an interview style.  It really wasn't bad at all.  I was surprised at how at ease I felt.  The SW was great.  She settled right in and was friendly and just so nice.  We talked about what we want for an adoption (sex, race, illnesses, handicaps, etc.), how open we plan to be, what we think our parenting styles will be like, stuff like that.  The one thing that was interesting was discussing what we thought about discipline.  What we thought that entailed and how we planned to discipline our children.  I know that this is a VERY debatable subject, but we both do believe in using a spanking in rare and occasional circumstances.  The SW seemed to get a bit hung up on this, but I think she was more pressing us just because she wanted to know when we though it was appropriate and all that fun.  I even mentioned using different disciplines/consequences for different circumstances and how different children my respond to different types of discipline, and she pressed me on that, so I don't know that she was really concerned about how we planned to discipline our children, but was more pressing to make sure that we were in agreement and had a level of comfort with providing a somewhat disciplined household.  In the end, I believe in balance.  I believe in both being a fun playmate and being a parent.  You can't always be your kid's best friend.  You DO have to be their parent, too.  You have to teach them to be a productive and meaningful person and that does require a level of discipline.

All-in-all I think we both felt like the interviews went well.  We talked to her together for a couple hours, individually for about 45 minutes each, and then again together and showed her around the house.  Not bad at all.  I'm relieved it's over.  I was a stressed mess leading up to it.  Plus, that being done, means we are just one step closer to completing the home study... One step at a time...

Our next step is an adoption preparation seminar that we'll need to attend.  The plan is to do that next month.  Then they need to review our medical certifications and our background check needs to come back.  Our references were all wonderful and sent letters right back and the SW had them all today, so that's great.  One more step to check off.  Then we await to hear if we "passed" or not... I'm trying to be cautiously optimistic about that.  I'm terribly nervous we won't pass for some reason.  :-/  I'm afraid to get my hopes up about passing and then not pass...but I don't see why we wouldn't pass...but maybe that's me being naive...

If we do pass, we fill out the packet to begin listing with the agency and create a book about us to show birth moms...our profile per se.  And then the REAL wait begins...for a match to be made...  The agency told us that they are under new ownership so they don't have numbers to tell us how long our wait will be, but their website says 3-12 months, so I'm going to go on that...knowing that's an average and our wait could be 3 days or it could be 3 years.  Either way, eventually we'll end up with a beautiful baby and that's all that really matters. In the meantime, I'm going to continue focusing on my health so that maybe, just maybe, we can also have a beautiful biological child.