Home Study

         Riley and I are currently completing our home study. For those of you who don’t know, this is the point in the adoption process where you are assigned a social worker that evaluates you and decides if you are fit to parent adopted children. First off I have to say our social worker is an amazing woman, we are so blessed to have her to do our home study. I wish that all adoptive families could be so lucky to have someone who does there job with grace, efficiency, professionalism and a good sense of humor.

            In the home study process you have to answer a lot of questions. Our first meeting was my individual interview. Different agencies and states have different regulations. For our agency, you must complete three couples interviews and each of you must complete an individual interview. I went first because of how our schedule worked out. I have to say being a person who generally does not like talking about anything that has to do with emotions, I was quite nervous. It turned out that the interview wasn’t bad. I credit our social worker for helping me feel at ease about the process.

            As I said before, there are many questions and it ended up taking an hour and a half. It felt like a lot of talking for me but Riley’s individual interview ended up lasting over two hours! A lot of the questions are about your family. Our social worker got to see our family first hand because of an entertaining turn of events during the tail end of Riley’s individual interview.

            Because we were in the middle of talking to our social worker, we were not answering our phones. Riley’s dad called us to ask if we would like to go to dinner and we didn’t answer. As the day drew on, he called several more times and we continued to not answer our phones. Riley’s dad is a loving worrier. He calls when he hears sirens, he calls to check in, he calls to hear your voice.

            Because we didn’t answer, he began to get worried and decided the best thing to do would be to come to our house and check on us (both sets of our parents live within 20 minutes of where we live). As Riley was finishing up his individual interview, I was in the bedroom on the computer. We heard frantic running up the stairs and then Riley’s dad burst in. Riley introduced him to the social worker who was very gracious and thought it was sweet what a caring father/ future grandfather he was. Needless to say, you never know what’s going to happen.

            With these meetings and questions, adoption is becoming more real and not just an idea to me. Sometimes I just look at Riley thinking, “This is really happening.” I feel like this process is changing us but in the best of ways. We are becoming better people through this process because each step has less and less to do with us and more and more to do with a child who needs a family.  It’s not an easy process or even close to over, but it’s a growing process and we are moving forward little by little, day by day.

 The paperwork can be daunting so we have been trying to enjoy the outdoors as much as possible, while the weather is still nice.

 

Here are some pictures of a hike we took right outside of Durango.