Our homestudy consisted of three 3 hour visits with our social worker. Our first was at our house which I was totally not ready for. I felt like we had to clean everything and make it look like we aren't slobs. I was nervous that our first visit was at our house, we hadn't even met our SW yet. Some agencies require you to have a baby room ready, ours did not. In fact she barely looked at the house. She mostly asked us questions about our childhood and what situations and condition we would be open too. We went out and bought a fire extinguisher and carbon monoxide detector and she didn't even ask about them. But it needed to be done anyway so I'm glad the homestudy motivated us to do it. I was learning more about adoption but still sort of naive to it and she acted offended by my questions, like I should know better. How do I know that in an open adoption the birthparents can't just show up on your doorstep? I've never done this before. Mike made a joke about his family and she took him seriously asking if they had mental illness or something. So we decided no more jokes. I cried all night and begged hubby to let me back out. I was having some serious doubts. Adoption is too much work, too invasive, too expensive and too huge for me to go through with. I didn't feel like our SW liked us and to go through all this without her in our corner seemed too much. Hubby assured me that this is God's plan for us and even though it seems hard and Satan may be on my shoulder trying to get me not to do, we had to keep going. I settled on the fact that once we were done with our homestudy and waiting, I would have some time to relax and get used to this whole situation.
I made our profile book on shutterfly and it turned out really well. I was worried that some of the scanned pictures wouldn't look as good when I got the books in the mail but luckily it was awesome. I did have a two typos but hey no one is perfect. I was offended when sour SW said not to include very many pictures of our farm or animals in our profile books because that turns people off. Turns out that's one of the reasons we got chosen by our birthparents but more on that later. We needed 5 copies of our books at about $25 each. No one mentioned that, I assumed I would only need one or two. But its reasonable for how well the books turned out. Not sure what I'll do with 5 profile books when this is all done but its still totally worth it. Before printing I emailed our SW the online version so she could see it. She suggested I include more racially diverse pictures. She must have forgotten I live in rural MN and there just isn't a lot of racial diversity in my family or neighborhood. I wasn't trying to be racist, its just how it is around here and I can't very well put pictures of strangers in my book.
Our second meeting we met an hour away in her hometown at a bakery. At least this was a neutral place. This meeting went much better after tons of prayers from us and our close friends. She asked about our infertility, our house, our marriage and our plans for parenthood and our feelings about adoption.
Our third meeting we met in the middle at a restaurant. This time she asked a lot of the same questions and I said I think we already answered these. She said she has to ask some of them again to make sure our answers are consistent. So not much new happened at this meeting. The middle of March we were done with our homestudy and it was submitted for approval to the director of our agency.
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