The Homestudy

Before I begin, I should note that these next few posts will be quite boring for anyone involved with adoption. However, I know many of our friends and family are not familiar with the process, so I wanted to chronicle for them what we have experienced and accomplished over the last year.

After applying with our chosen adoption agency on Valentine’s Day, we received word from them within three days that they were willing to accept us as clients in their Bulgaria program. While we waited for our contracts and then gave ourselves lots of time to read and sign them, we chose a local homestudy agency.

At this point, some of you might be wondering what a homestudy is. In a nutshell, it’s the process of assessing and preparing a family for adoption. It is used to determine the family's suitability to adopt and the type of child whose needs would be best met by that family. Homestudies are required for any kind of adoption and the components vary from state to state. Our homestudy consisted of two meetings with our social worker, 12 credit hours of adoption training, child abuse clearances from all states we have lived in since age 18, fingerprint checks by the OH BCI and the FBI, a fire inspection of our home by the local fire marshall, four letters of reference, a financial statement, as well as first aid and child CPR certification. I am sure there was more, but these are the main parts I recall.

Our homestudy was completed in May, approving us to adopt two Bulgarian children of either gender ages 0-36 months in good health relative to orphanage care and possibly with minor and/or correctable medical needs.

I don’t really know how to begin this blog other than by admitting that I should probably have started it much sooner. For those of you who do not yet know, Craig and I are adopting. We did not come to this decision lightly by any means. In fact, we spent about five years struggling to determine how we wanted our life to unfold in regard to having children. We repeatedly weighed all of our options, going back and forth discussing all the pros and cons of the different roads we could choose to travel from here on out. We were more or less stuck in our careful deliberations. Finally one year ago today on an ordinary evening at home, we were flipping through the TV channels and landed on a local special called “Love Knows No Borders” about orphans and adoption in Bulgaria. Both of us took this event as the sign we had been waiting for to guide us toward a decision. That night we resolved to investigate adoption agencies with Bulgaria programs as soon as the new year had begun. We followed through with our plan in January and on Valentine’s Day 2009 sent in our application for an adoption to our agency of choice. Yesterday, only one day off the one year mark, we got word from our agency that our adoption dossier has been registered with the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice which means we are officially waiting parents now.

Of course, the 365 days that have passed since we saw “Love Knows No Borders” have been filled with many adoption related tasks and lots of learning which I will recount in the posts to come, so stay tuned.