Feels like we’ve officially begun the process now. Yesterday we met with our social worker for the first time. She gave us the “mound of paperwork” to complete, went through the details of the process, and got to know us a little!
Didn’t hear too much information that we didn’t know already, but can’t help being a little panicked hearing of the amount of money we’ll need officially.
Here’s a little of what we learned…
- Our “social worker” is actually the lady I’ve been working with at the agency. YAY! So it’s not a random stranger!
- The “mound of paperwork” is not near as thick as I thought it would be. I think they are giving it to us in manageable piles though… so I’m sure there’s more to come! haha
- Our future baby WILL be in a foster care situation and will be “SPOILED”!
That makes my heart feel a little better knowing our baby will be living with a family for it’s first 6-9 months of life as opposed to an orphanage situation.
Our first step is for each of us to complete a 7 page self-examination. It’s basically an in depth psych evaluation. We have individual meetings scheduled with the social worker to go over the self-examinations for June 17th.
Then we will setup our home visit meeting (where the social worker will come to our house with her white glove and inspect)! Just kidding… she put our minds to rest and said we don’t have to do anything crazy… she just wants to make sure we have adequate space for a baby, have working fire extinguishers, carbon monoxide testers, etc. We will have to pay her $3,450 that day.
We complete all of the paperwork and 10 hours of online training. Then they will invoice us for about $5,000 which will be due about a month after we have our home visit.
Then I think we’ll be given the USCIS paperwork to complete and we’ll go on the wait list for a referral (match with a baby).
So we’re just taking it one step at a time! We’ll be working on our self-examinations over the next week in preparation for our individual meetings with the social worker. Hopefully neither of us are secretly crazy and just don’t know it! haha
Please keep both of us in your prayers! I’m studying for my certification exam next month and have a bachelorette party to plan for next weekend so things are just a little crazy right now! I’m gonna need a lot of caffeine! haha
I’ll keep everyone posted… Love you guys!!
Hi Tiffany-
My name is Betsy Sylvester and I used to work with Daniel at the day care center that his mom owned in CT. I am very excited that you are going to adopt – my husband and I are also going through the adoption process but we are going through the State of CT. We are requesting an infant under the age of 2. I agree that the paper work is crazy and the hoops that you have to jump through are a little crazy but know that it will all be worth it in the long run!! You are lucky that you can do classes on line – we have to go to 13 weeks of classes on Tuesday nights from 6-9! THe good thing is that we are half done with the classes. We have also had one home visit – and it wasn’t bad at all!!
Good luck with your process and I look forward to reading your updates!
~Betsy