Home Study in Simple Terms

As you can tell, we have not been diligent bloggers.  I would like to say that is because we have been so busy with the adoption process.  However, things have slowly been moving forward.  Many of you have received a letter from us letting you know we are adopting and trying to raise the funds necessary to complete such an endeavor.  If you did not receive a letter, we may have simply forgot to send one to you so don't think we were trying to avoid you.

We wanted to give you a brief update on where we are in the process.  As mentioned in the heading of this post, we are thick in the Home Study phase.  Many of the initial forms, background checks, fingerprinting, etc have been completed. Now, we are in the home study phase...the phase all prospective adoptive parents are required to participate.  The purpose of a home study is to educate and prepare the family for adoption, evaluate the qualifications of the family for adoption, and attempt to match the family with a child whose needs they can meet.  For Katy and I, much of this started when both of us wrote out our autobiographies.  Imagine taking a 35 question essay test (1 or 2 paragraphs per question).  This is essentially what we did in writing out these autobiographies.  We answered questions about our childhood, our own parents, our interests and desires, our parenting styles, religion and belief systems, and personalities within our own family.  Around 15-17 pages later (single-spaced too), we were finished.  Fortunately, both Katy and I started our autobiographies almost two years ago when we started this process the first time and it didn't feel like we were cramming a thesis into a few days.

As part of our home study, we have been meeting with a social worker who essentially is grading our autobiographies - asking us questions about everything that we wrote.  Many of the questions have felt somewhat invasive and others seems to elicit a defensive response.  However, it seems most of the questions are designed to provide a picture into our ability to be stable parents and to handle a lot of unknowns with a child that didn't get a fair start in life.  At this point, we have completed 4 sessions with our social worker.  Aside from a couple of untimely events where Merritt got hurt running off by herself into the land of big items (neglect) and a bored Stimson denied knowing anything about adopting from Africa, I think things have gone OK.  Our social worker will now create a home study report that we will review prior to her finalizing.  This report will be sent on with our dossier to help locate a match for us.

Things seem to be quiet heading into Christmas.  We hope to have more to share with you soon.  Have a great Christmas and thanks for continuing to support us!