Home study

Well for those of you who are new to the adoption world (like we are) .....the first step is the home study.    This is when a local social worker comes to your home a few times.  She interviewed Paul and me as well as the kids.  She made sure that everyone was on board for adding another kiddo to the family.  Luckily, everyone was ;-)  Because we had looked at a couple of different kids that needed homes we called local agencies this summer.  Both of those kiddos found their forever families.  But we decided to start our home study anyway.  So that began around the end of August.  We have now completed most of the stuff required for our home study.  We are just waiting on finger print clearances to come back.  We are meeting to read and go over our home study on November 14th.  We are excited to have that piece done!  Next up is the dossier!  This is similiar to the home study but it has more pieces.  It has to be notarized and then appostilled.  It is my understanding that appostilling is like notarizing the notary LOL.  We have to take all the documents to Denver and they give them a gold stamp for each page.  It is $3 per page........nothing is cheap in adoption LOL.
Once our dossier is complete (which honestly seems like the impossible dream ) it is sent to Eastern Europe.  I believe that it is after that when we are invited to go meet Rita for the first time.  The whole process is about a year.  But they describe adoption like a rollercoaster.  Lots of ups and downs and you don't know what is around the next corner.  We are hoping that things go smoothly but realize that they may not.   But at the end of the day, it is all worth it to get this precious girl home  to our family.  I can't bare the thought of her being sent to an adult mental institution next year.
So I am hoping to keep people posted on our progress on this blog.  Feel free to ask any questions you want.........if I don't have the answers I will try to find them! 

Thanks for coming along on our journey!