Monday, April 8, 2013

What does this Road look like? The Home Study

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mannaz/6993752921/

I am hoping this will be the first in a series of posts that outline how our adoption process will proceed. Overall the process for us is likely to take 2-3 years.The clock started on February of 2013.There are four major parts to the process and a bunch of smaller ones within those.

The major parts as best we can tell at this point are:

1. The home study
2. The dossier
3. Child placement
4. Travel to bring the child home

We are currently in the home study phase. This is the part that many people refer to as the paper chase. During the paper chase we are asked to assemble about 30 different documents.  Some of them are easy to do such as signing an agreement stating we shall not use corporal punishment.  Others take a little more time time and effort like scheduling physicals for every member of the family or getting fingerprinted.

One of the more interesting ones is asking for the list of all the places you have lived during the last 28 years.  Now, for both Jenn and myself that is almost our entire lives.  This includes our time in college and Jenn's study abroad in Switzerland.  You need to submit a background check request to child protective services in every state and country you have listed.  Luckily for us, Switzerland does not have a central registry so we did not need to worry about that.

Other required documents are ones that I had never thought about like having an evacuation plan in case of an emergency.  This plan needs to include information about where you would go if your entire community was evacuated.  At this point we have about 26 of the documents completed not including the financial ones that I repeatedly make addition errors on (and I used to teach mathematics).

Once the majority of the paper work is done you are assigned a social worker.  The social worker makes a few visits to your house to evaluate the suitability of the home for adoptive children.  They also work with you and the family to determine the ages and needs of the children you are best suited to bring into your family.  During this time the social worker will likely interview all the members of the family including our children.  We will find out more about this part of the process at the orientation we will attend shortly.