Home Study Complete!
Whew! What a great few weeks it has been for us! We passed our fire inspection on June 17th, have been feverishly working on our profile book, and had our final Home Study visit on June 30th! I truly think that all new parents should have to do the things adoptive/foster parents do, just because it's a good learning experience!
For example, who would have guessed the number of smoke detectors you should have in your home! Basically every living space should have a smoke detector, except your kitchen (that one confused me at first). But when the fire marshall explained it, it made perfect sense. When you have a smoke detector in your kitchen, you have times that something burns and sets off a false alarm (not me...but other people 😉). Kids end up not taking the alarm seriously because they start to think it's a false alarm. So they suggest putting the detectors in all living rooms, the basement, each bedroom and the hallway between bedrooms. By the way, have you seen the new smoke detectors? We went ahead and got new ones for the whole house because they do have expiration dates on them...be sure to check yours! I think they last about 10 years and then you should buy new. The new ones that we got are the size of a marshmallow (see pic below)!
In addition to the smoke detectors, we had to mount a fire extinguisher, put in outlet covers and have an evacuation plan posted, among a few other things. Thankfully our fire marshall was very helpful ahead of time, so we were well prepared when he came for our inspection and we easily passed.
On June 30th, we had our final visit with our social worker for our home study! We started by doing the Safety Audit, which is where she had to walk around the house and check that everything was safe and nothing was concerning for bringing a child into the household. We of course cleaned like crazy to make sure everything was in order. It literally took 10 minutes to go through and was super easy! After that, we did our child characteristics checklist. Thankfully we had the list ahead of time and had gone through it. That was probably one of the most difficult parts of the whole process. Basically it is about 6 pages with 2 columns on each page, that lists everything imaginable of what you would be willing to consider for your adoption placement. You read each item and mark "will consider" or "will not consider". It starts out with things like gender and race, and then moves on to special needs/circumstances. Most of the items don't really apply to us because we are doing newborn adoption and we won't know a lot of the diagnosis until after we have already adopted, but it still was really hard to go through the list. There is this feeling of guilt for items that you mark, "will not consider". After that was complete, our social worker talked with Chris (similar to what she did with me back in May). And then we were done!
So, next steps...our social worker will complete her write up of our home study and turn it into the agency. She said she will work on that this week. Someone at the agency then reads and approves us. Once we are approved, we begin to be "active" and are shown to birth parents!!! She thinks this will be done around the 1st of August. On our end, all we have left to do is finish our profile book and get copies to the agency and pay some fees. We are about 99% done with the profile book. I will write a separate post about it soon, because it deserves its own post with the work that went into it. Thanks for everyone's prayers and support throughout this process. You have no idea how much they have helped us!
