Homestudy Draft, Plus A New Picture!

If you've never taken part in the adoption process, the paperwork required for all of the different steps might seem confusing and overwhelming to keep track of. It's not much better when you're actually doing it. Okay, so it isn't really that bad as long as you just do the next thing, but there is a lot to keep track of.  I talked about it a little bit HERE.

What does the homestudy say? It talks about your home, background, family, medical history, training, parenting style, and general suitability for adoption. It lists the numbers of children, ages, and special needs you are approved to adopt. Before the social worker writes your homestudy, you spend a lot of time learning about adoption and your social worker spends a lot of time learning about you.

The homestudy is your first big checkpoint.  We now have a draft of ours, so after a few revisions, we will be completely done with this first stage. Woohoo!

What does that leave? We need to get our immigration approval. We need to complete the last couple documents to send to Eastern Europe, where they will be translated.  When both of those things are finished, our dossier will be submitted to the government! They will look things over and approve them, then give us permission to travel.

When will that happen? This is a tougher question to answer.  We know what steps we need to take, but not how long each one will require.  The average time for immigration approval is listed as 2.5 months, but obviously some people are faster than that and some are slower.  Hopefully because we are planning to adopt a waiting child with special needs, we will not have any unnecessary delays.  Once that last form is received from immigration, our dossier will be submitted.  The other forms will already be completed, sent over, and translated to make things move as quickly as possible. Our time to travel is also very fluid.  Some people get travel dates within a month of submitting and with as little as three days notice before they need to appear in Eastern Europe! The average is two to three months. We won't be booking flights in advance, that's for sure!

We think this smile is worth all of the work though.  What do you think?

By the way, it's Friday! Our Vacation Giveaway is listed in this week's Reece's Rainbow Friday Family Fundraisers. Check out some of the neat things other families are doing to raise money!