It is finally ready!!

Our home study is finally ready!!! This is long overdue. Our social worker finally submitted the home study to the agency on March 31. They told us it would take about one week for them to check and edit it and then it would be sent to us for a review. Once the week had passed I sent a polite but strong email asking them when the report would be ready. The head of the social work department responded curtly that we should have it for review early in the week of April 11th but they do have ninety days to complete the home study and they were well within the ninety days. (Why they say it takes the social worker two weeks to write and then they take about a week to review is beyond me!)

So we waited patiently through the weekend only to get a call on Sunday afternoon from our social worker saying the agency would like her to interview Nick after all. Now I am sure the agency did not call our social worker on Sunday but you can see the kind of timeline she works on. She gets around to things when she can. All this meant another strong email to the agency and a call to the social worker. The social worker did interview Nick, for a total of about five minutes, over the phone on Monday evening.

We finally got the report for review on Wednesday, April 13th. Steve and I went through it in two hours and sent the agency all the necessary changes. Then we waited some more. A common theme with adoption!

Finally, on Monday, April 18th, we got an email from Anna at the agency saying that our home study was finalized and she sent it off to the INS. The approval normally takes four to six weeks. She encouraged us to get our dossier packet ready so we can move forward with that as soon as the approval from INS is in. Our dossier is almost done. I have two papers that need to be finished. I plan on doing that and then sending the whole packet to Anna for review before we go through the expense of getting them all notarized and certified.

I am so happy the home study part of this process is behind us. This was one huge hurdle that we passed. Every hurdle that we pass bring us that much closer to our baby.