The Dossier

Once again, for any of you experiencing or experienced in international adoption, this blog will not be of great interest. However, for our friends and family, here’s the next step we had to complete after the homestudy: the dossier. A dossier is defined as a collection of papers containing detailed information about a particular person or subject, in this case, about Craig and me and our adoption. Dossier requirements vary slightly depending upon from which country you adopt, but here’s what we had to collect for ours:

1) Completed application to the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice (three original and signed versions of this same document were needed)
2) Power of attorney from us to our US agency
3) Power of attorney from us to our Bulgarian agency
4) I-797 C letter from USCIS (this means we filed form I-800A with the US government and they approved us for an international adoption from a Hague country)
5) Homestudy
6) Copy of the homestudy agency’s license
7) A recommendation letter from the homestudy agency
8) Medical certificates for each parent signed by a physician in front of a notary (this included a regular exam as well as HIV and tuberculosis tests – Craig enjoyed making the phone call in which he had to schedule HIV tests for his wife and himself)
9) Certified copy of our marriage certificate
10) Certificate of a Hague Accredited Child Placing Agency (our US agency)
11) A signed agreement for our Bulgarian agency
12) A financial form outlining our assets, liabilities, income, etc.
13) Photocopies of our passports
14) A privacy document
15) And a couple of photo pages showing us, our home, and our daily life

All of these documents had to be notarized and apostilled. An apostille is a certification from the Secretary of State's office verifying the authenticity of a document's notarization. In other words, it’s the Secretary of State affirming that we used a real, registered notary. Now in Ohio, between the notarization and the apostille, there’s a required little step called county certification in which your County Clerk of Courts gets to add his/her own stamp to certify that the notary we used is registered in the county he/she practices and that his/her commission has not expired. The only way to circumvent this intermediate step is to use a notary whose commission never expires and whose name is on file with the Secretary of State’s office. Even though we didn’t know this at first and caused ourselves some extra work and expenses, we were lucky to have a friend who is a lawyer and notary who not only notarized everything for us for free (Thanks, Whitney!), but whose notary stamp allowed us to skip the county certification and go straight to the apostille for many of the documents once we had figured out the system.

More Homestudy News

When I started making entries about our homestudy, I did not expect to be posting the blog you are about to read, but now here it is nonetheless.

Shortly after Christmas, we received a letter from our homestudy agency informing us that they would be closing in January 2010. Our social worker is going to work for another agency, opening a regional office here in Southwest Ohio for them. We were invited to transfer with her and, initially, we did want to follow her to her new agency. Therefore, we asked her to send us any paperwork associated with the switch along with a schedule of fees for a homestudy update, six post-placement visits, etc.

While we were waiting for this information, I called two other local agencies just to get a cost comparison. Then I sent a message to the Bulgaria Adopt Forum and was given two recommendations for a third local agency that I also contacted. I felt a connection with this agency’s director right away and also found their prices to be extremely reasonable and very much in line with what we had expected to pay to our original homestudy agency as well as with what the other two agencies had quoted.

Then, a few days ago, I received the paperwork packet from our social worker’s new agency and about fell out of my chair when I saw the three printed pages of fees that would be associated with a transfer. On top of the high homestudy update and post-placement report/visit fees, there were also a hefty transfer fee, a post-placement administration fee, and an annual program fee. The latter is $500, so considering that we need a homestudy update this year and three years of post-placement reports when our kids come home, that alone is $2000.

I sat down at the computer to make a side-by side spreadsheet to compare and add up all the costs between our social worker’s new agency and the other agency that I really liked. The final tally came to over $5500 for the first and just over $2200 for the second, all services rendered being equal. That’s a cost difference of well over $3000 and I knew there was simply no way my husband and I could justify paying that much extra money to remain with a social worker we like.

So, as disappointing as it was, yesterday I requested to have our homestudy case file transferred to a different agency. We won’t need any services from them until later this year, so they will simply hold our file for a while. We are sad to lose our first social worker, but I am sure we will get along just fine with whoever takes her place.

As you may have noticed, I did not mention any specific names in this blog as I am not trying to help or hinder either agency in their pursuit to create forever families. I just recommend that anyone beginning the adoption process carefully research all of the options. Yes, it is important to have a good rapport with your agency/agencies, but international adoption is an expensive adventure, so sometimes numbers do, by necessity, speak louder than words.

Homestudy Required Education

While we were gathering documents and working on various homestudy tasks, we also completed our 12 credit hours of required homestudy training. We chose to fulfill these credits solely through reading because this was the most affordable option and because, due to my background, reading and writing are my preferred methods of absorbing and processing information.

Here’s a list of everything we read for the homestudy:

• Are Those Kids Yours? American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries by Cheri Register
• “Developmental Recovery and Deficit in Children Adopted from Eastern European Orphanages” by Sharon Judge, PhD, University of Tennessee–Knoxville
• “Top 10 Secrets of Successful Adoption Travel” by Adoptive Families Magazine
• “Adoption Subsidy Guide” by The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services
• “Positive Adoption Language” by Adoptive Families Magazine
• “Talking to Your Three-to-Five-Year-Old About Adoption” by Adoptive Families Magazine
• “Infants and Young Children in Orphanages: One View From Pediatrics and Child Psychiatry” by Deborah A. Frank, MD, Perry E. Klass, MD, Felton Earls MDS, Leon Eisenberg , MD
• “Language Development in Internationally Adopted Children” by Boris Gindis Ph.D.
• “Culture, Heritage, and Stereotypes” by Jerri Ann Jenista; Adoptive Families Magazine
• Introduction to Transracial or Transcultural Adoption by www.adoption.com
• Raising Adopted Children by Lois Ruskai Melina
• Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today’s Parents by Deborah D. Gray
• “Helping Traumatized Children: A Brief Overview for Caregivers” by Bruce D. Perry
• “Bonding and Attachment in Maltreated Children: Consequences of Emotional Neglect in Childhood” by B. D. Perry
• Openness in Adoption: Factsheet for Families (http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/f_openadopt.cfm)
• “Talking to Your Six to-Eight-Year-Old About Adoption” by Adoptive Families Magazine
• Emotional Issues of Adoption
www.internationaladoptionhelp.com/international_adoption/international_adoption_emotional_issues
• Cultures of Transnational Adoption edited by Toby Alice Volkman
• The Family Book by Todd Parr

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.