Home Study - Check!
Okay, so the home study is really only a partial check. I was getting excited is all.
Yesterday we had our first home study visit. Normally you need to have two visits with the social worker but since we are attending a parenting seminar held by our social worker DeNese we only need to have one visit. It ended up being more educational for us than I expected. I thought we would be providing more information to her, but it turned out to be the opposite.
First we gave DeNese a tour of our house and she asked to see things like bedrooms, bathrooms, the garage, smoke detectors, and the carbon monoxide detector. Then we sat down to talk. Greg and I had prepared autobiographies and another long question/answer form talking about our history, our hobbies, and our plans for the future with our child. This will all help her write a 6-7 page paper on the two of us to send in with our I-600A and to send to Guatemala. We went through a check list of all the things she needed us to submit to her and got to check off several of those. Mostly we talked about what we can expect being a trans-racial family and having an adopted child - questions that will be asked, support groups we can join, etc. We talked about creating a scrapbook/lifebook to help our child understand where he came from. She made me feel even more excited about our family growing!
After she left Greg and I both felt that things were more real. DeNese kept referring to the child that we will adopt as "he". Over and over it was "he will do this" or "he will ask that". It was just one more step closer to us realizing that this isnt just an idea anymore. This is a human being and he will be our son.
We had taken the morning off work so we tried to tackle one more thing. We headed downtown to the immigration office to be fingerprinted - a requirement for the I-600A to be approved. It was a simple process, however finding a place to park in the middle of the day downtown was not so easy. We still need to get one other set of fingerprints done that need to be included in our dossier.
I guess the next things on the list are getting physicals and letters from our doctor. (Getting those letters completed and notarized properly should be interesting.) We have to get a couple of referral letters and that is in the works too. Oh, and then there are the other mountains of paperwork.
Yesterday we had our first home study visit. Normally you need to have two visits with the social worker but since we are attending a parenting seminar held by our social worker DeNese we only need to have one visit. It ended up being more educational for us than I expected. I thought we would be providing more information to her, but it turned out to be the opposite.
First we gave DeNese a tour of our house and she asked to see things like bedrooms, bathrooms, the garage, smoke detectors, and the carbon monoxide detector. Then we sat down to talk. Greg and I had prepared autobiographies and another long question/answer form talking about our history, our hobbies, and our plans for the future with our child. This will all help her write a 6-7 page paper on the two of us to send in with our I-600A and to send to Guatemala. We went through a check list of all the things she needed us to submit to her and got to check off several of those. Mostly we talked about what we can expect being a trans-racial family and having an adopted child - questions that will be asked, support groups we can join, etc. We talked about creating a scrapbook/lifebook to help our child understand where he came from. She made me feel even more excited about our family growing!
After she left Greg and I both felt that things were more real. DeNese kept referring to the child that we will adopt as "he". Over and over it was "he will do this" or "he will ask that". It was just one more step closer to us realizing that this isnt just an idea anymore. This is a human being and he will be our son.
We had taken the morning off work so we tried to tackle one more thing. We headed downtown to the immigration office to be fingerprinted - a requirement for the I-600A to be approved. It was a simple process, however finding a place to park in the middle of the day downtown was not so easy. We still need to get one other set of fingerprints done that need to be included in our dossier.
I guess the next things on the list are getting physicals and letters from our doctor. (Getting those letters completed and notarized properly should be interesting.) We have to get a couple of referral letters and that is in the works too. Oh, and then there are the other mountains of paperwork.
posted by Annie and Greg @ 1:50 PM
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