First Appointment

So our first appointment with the homestudy worker has been set for Sunday, the 11th. So this gives us some time this weekend to put all medicine in a locked cabinet, cleaning supplies higher up, and general cleaning. This past weekend, we finally hung up our smoke detectors and bought fire extinguishers. Now I get to wonder what types of things we will be asked....

Waiting....

So I left off in my last post with how all the work was to begin. It has been just about a month since Adam and I went to the Weekend Intensive at our agency, and I am proud to say we are just about done with all the paperwork. After all of that rushing, and writing, and urging Adam to write, we are now at a standstill, waiting for the next step.

For those of you interested, I will go over what needs to happen in order to have a domestic infant adoption.
The Home Study
This is basically the steps the state takes in order to see if you are fit to be parents through adoption. If you were to do a private adoption through an attorney, you would still need to hire an agency or the state to conduct a home study. I am pretty sure each state has different criteria, but I bet they are all somewhat similar. In California we need to each answer a questionnaire, which has questions on it like:
" How do you plan to discipline your child?"
"What aspects of child rearing are important to you?"
"How would you describe yourself? (personality, strengths, limitations)
"Describe your spouse's/partner's personality and strengths. What would you change?"
As you can see, you really have to think about what it will be like to have a child and how will you discipline them? And everybody loves writing down their strengths and weaknesses, right?
We also need to write an autobiography, which thankfully, they give a guideline as to what they are looking for. This was really fun.
"Describe your childhood."
"Describe your relationship with your parents and siblings during your growing up years."
"What do you remember about your parents marriage?"
"What parental expectations and messages did you get?"
"What rebellious experiences did you have as a teenager?"
"Outline your work history from your present job, including dates, job descriptions and your reasons for leaving each position."
This is just a sampling of what they want to know. Other items needed for the home study:
- Live Scan fingerprinting for every adult living in your home.
- DMV driving record.
- Your doctor needs to fill out a Physical form attesting to your good health, along with a form that you fill out with your health history.
- TB test results
- 3 letters of recommendation from non-relatives.
- Employment verifications
- Criminal Record statement.
- Marriage, divorce certificates if applicable.
- School records of your children if applicable.
- Proof of medical insurance.
We also need to have two interviews with our Home Study worker, one of them at home, so they can inspect our house.
So, after all that, we are given a pass or fail grade on if we are ready to be parents. That is just a tad bit nerve wracking.
Right now, we are waiting to hear from the home study worker, so we can make appointments for the interviews.
While doing all of this, we are also in the middle of writing our Dear Birthmother letter. This is where we try and give the birthmother an idea of who we are. There will be tons of pictures in this as well. I have already sent in the first draft, and corrected half of it. I am just waiting for the second half corrections, and any additions or deletions we need to make with our photo choices. So you see, we are in a waiting phase at the moment. Which is hard, because we really want to get this going, after waiting for so long already.

My first post

Hello. This is my first blog, where I actually am going to write something, so bear with me. I want to be able to customize this page, but I need to figure out how first.

The purpose of this blog is to document our adoption journey, as the title might suggest. I thought it was important to document this major life event, since it will, despite how we feel now, go by quickly and I want to be able to look back with our child and see how we became a family.

You may be wondering how Adam and I first got on this path? (wow, I sound so zen) Like so many other couples, we wanted to start a family. I knew that I had fertility issues, and we went to doctors and had tests, and we were told that in order to get pregnant we would have to do in vitro. We then took a break, and really thought about what it was that we wanted to do. Suddenly, an option that I had never really considered before began to take root in my mind; adoption. After much discussion, we both came to conclusion that adoption was the way that we wanted to add to our family.

Then came all the research, and I learned about open adoption. Here is how our agency describes open adoption:

Open Adoption includes birth and adoptive parents meeting one another, sharing full identifying information, and having direct access to ongoing contact over the years. In open adoption, birthparents and adopting parents select each other. They have control over all critical decisions in their adoption, including the amount of ongoing contact.

Open adoption has been the subject of intense study in recent years, and it has been found to be psychologically the healthiest form of adoption for birthparents, children, and adoptive families. Research has shown that the more open an open adoption is the healthier it is.

As someone who doesn't like secrets, this seemed the way to go for us. So we went to a couple adoption seminars, and we then made our choice in agencies. All of this happened at the end of 2008. We were all set to sign up, but we were a bit nervous about the economy, and how slow things were at Adam's job, so we waited. Sure enough, Adam was laid off for about 2 months, luckily it wasn't longer. To make a long story short, we finally signed the contract this past February. Now all the work began......