The Homestudy begins

We had our first appointment with our social worker for our homestudy on Thursday. It went well and we have individual appointments and our home visit this next week and we should be done with the homestudy. We are in the process of getting our dossier documents together. Just a little progress in the LONG process.

Our 1st appt.

Our social worker emailed me today and we have an appt. on Thurs the 29th for our first visit for the homestudy. We have to go to Springfield and meet with her so she can get to know us and our backgrounds. The next step is for her to do a home visit. She will come to our house and I really have no clue what she will do. For anyone who is curious about the process, I will kind of explain what we have to do. (this is a new thing for us too) We have signed up with an adoption agency called International family services, and we also have a social worker, Annie, who works for Lutheran Family and Children Services. Our first step is getting a homestudy done so we can submit that to IFS. We have a LOT of paper work we have to complete including: passports (done), a letter to the orphanage of Toukoul, listing a bunch of financial info, a few government docs, and I'm not even sure what else. Once we get the paperwork sent in to the Ethiopian government, they will send us a referral which is a picture and info about a child that "fits" us. The agency says it usually takes 3-12 weeks from the time the dossier (all the paperwork) is sent in. If we accept the referral we travel to Ethiopia in approximately 8 weeks to pick up the child. We will stay for 7-10 days in Addis Abba, Ethiopia and then we will returyn home with our daughter!! We are trying for a girl. So....we are in the midst of gathering info for the dossier meaning we have probably 5 months or so (totally a guess) until we get a referral. We'll keep you posted though.

Evan: 14 months

The start of the waiting game

Ok so anyone who knows about adoptions knows there is a lot of waiting involved. We got our applications mailed off and had to write autobiographies for our homestudy. I emailed those yesterday so we're waiting on the social worker to call us in for our first interview. It's the beginning of a long waiting period but we are at least progressing.

I did it

I did it! I mailed our applications for our homestudy and our agency contract today. Hopefully we will hear something next week!!!!

Evan

Just beginning

Brad and I have been throwing the idea of international adoption for a while. Tom and Rhonda, they are my bosses, just adopted a 10 year old girl (Silu) from India. While they were in the process Brad and I became very interested in pursuing an international adoption. We had originally planned on adopting from India; hoping we may find a girl from the same orphanage as Silu. We started getting things together in the fall of 2008 and ran into a road block: India is a member of the Hague Treaty so the adoption agency we go thru must have Hague accredidation. We are going thru International Family Services and they are waiting on the final word for their accredidation. Therefore, we are unable to pursue an India adoption. We have decided we would like to try for Ethiopia now. We know we want a girl and have decided we would like her a little older so we said age 3-7. We are tossing around the idea of a siblings (crazy I know)but we have not committed to anything yet. We have the application to IFS completed and just have to send it in the mail which I plan on doing tomorrow. We are both very excited and can't wait to find out what's in store with our adoption.