More Paperwork

I was getting pretty proud of myself for gathering a ton of pictures, shifting through them and selecting those that will work plus writing the profile which turned out to be roughly 3 pages of text. Dusty was handling the homestudy information. I thought we had a handle on everything.

Since we are working with an out of town adoption attorney, we need to find a local agency that can perform the "homestudy". From what we had been able to gather it seemed like it entailed some interviews with the social worker, a visit to our home for an inspection, and letters of recommendation. Dusty contacted some agencies and found a really wonderful one called Special Children, Inc out of Milwaukee. The social worker we are working with is adopted herself and can really offer great insight to all our questions and potential concerns.

As I was calming down and feeling on top of things a massive packet came in the mail from them yesterday. It contains a TON of things we need to do such as:

-Get fingerprinted - we were able to do this at the local police station this morning
-Gather our marriage and birth certificates
-Have a physical exam (not really sure why on this one)
-Get police information from not only WI, but also OH since we haven't lived here for 5 years (not sure why teh fingerprinting doesn't cover this)
-Get 3 letters of Rec
- Fill out more and more and more and more forms (I swear there are like 25 pages of forms!)
-Each write an autobiography that is limited to 4 typed pages, but the list of what questions to answer is about 50 long, so how that is possible I don't know.
-Complete 18 hours of education either online or in person. We will be doing the online thing due to our schedules. There are also books you can buy that count.

I am sure there are more things we need to do that I can't think of right now, but this was very overwhelming yesterday. There are some good things going on though too:

1.) The actual home inspection is going to happen this Sunday. They don't usually work on Sunday's but because we are on a time crunch they made an exception. They are really awesome people. This means we need to clean, clean and clean some more! Anyone want to come and help?

2.) Apparently the homestudy being completed doesn't impact being shown to birthmothers. As soon as the profile is done we will start to be shown regardless of the homestudy status. The only thing that matters is that it is completed and official before we bring home the baby, so in theory it does limit who we are presented to, but not that we are presented. Basically, if we know it will be done in 4 weeks, we willl be shown to any birthmother with a delivery date more than 4 weeks away to give it time to be completed.

Time to start writing my autobiography.