Home Study Update

Tuesday afternoon we had a visit from our social worker at Adoption Assistance, Meredith, for our home study update. Last year we had completed a home study for a private domestic adoption, so we were thankful to not have to jump through too many hoops to update our study for an international adoption. Meredith has just adopted 2 babies from Ethiopia and she used the same agency we’re going through so we were able to get a lot of our questions answered during our visit together which was fabulous! We also were able to learn a little about the different orphanages in Ethiopia and the precious people who work at them who really love on the kiddos. To say the least, it made us even more excited to bring those little ones home someday!

You may be wondering; what in the world is a home study? Basically, all prospective adopting parents must go through an agency which will assess them as parents and their home to make sure it is a safe environment for children to come into. There are all sorts of forms the prospective parents must fill out from background checks, to financial status forms, to questionnaires asking about child-rearing philosophy . Once the prospective parents have all the paper work filled out, and after a home visit from the home study social worker, all the information is written up into a document entitled a “home study”.

So… what’s next? Meredith told us to anticipate about 4-6 weeks before we will get our home study back from her completed. Once she finishes our study, she will mail in our immigration form (it’s called an I-600A) which is a honking expensive form that allows you clearance to bring children into America. We will then get a copy of our homestudy to attach to our dossier (which is a packet of a lot of documents which we will explain in another post!). We currently only have a few items left on our dossier check list; so once we get our home study back, we will be able to move forward in sending our dossier in! Yay!

Thanks so much for praying for us through this process. The paper work has been a little overwhelming at times, but God’s grace has been so sufficient. He has given strength for each new day. We know we can do absolutely nothing without Him.