05.26.06 - And we're off!!

No, not to Kazakhstan. Not yet anyway. :-) Paperwork Round 1 is complete! It's in the mail. The notarized stuff is in a packet that is both registered and requires signature. So why is "in the mail" a big deal? Well other than the obvious of course- you can neither succeed nor fail if you don't try... But the even bigger deal is that the checks went out with it. Nice sized checks. Granted we still have to pass the home study, but we're committed now. Before it was all just talk. Now it really is "something."

You guys should have seen the stack of paperwork. Once I made copies of everything for myself, the stack was two inches tall! Now I will say it's separated into about 8 Manila folders, so they added to the height, but still...

Jim was so cute the other day. See, we have to get letters from our doctors stating we're in good health so I called our clinic and made appointments for both of us for physicals and blood work. Well Jim doesn't like doctors and the sight of his own blood makes him quite queasy and he turns white. So the morning of his appointment the first thing he does when he wakes up is grumble, "I have to go to the doctor today." :-) Poor guy. He survived though. He said they sucked so much blood out of him that his arm shriveled and turned to a prune. I tried to call him on it by saying, "C'mon! They only take three small vials." He was adamant though. He insisted that they were three barrels and that his whole arm did shrivel up. :-)

So anyway, what's next? I think I've mentioned this before, but I'll go through it again as there are many details to this process. In order to adopt, we have to go through what's called a home study. A social worker will come visit us at least twice, and both visits will take about 3 hours each. She/He then gives us a thumbs up or down. If we get the thumbs up, he/she writes a report saying as such.

So what I did today was I mailed off two application forms (plus some other documents). The first application went to the agency we want to use to adopt from Kazakhstan. World Partners Adoption. They will start processing our application, but won't finalize it until they receive two things: 1) 4 positive reference letters, 2) passing result from the homestudy.

The second application form was to the home study agency- Summit Adoption Home Studies here in St. Paul. WPA does home studies as well, but they are located in the state of Georgia. We are not. :-) Therefore because we chose an adoption agency out of state, we must choose a home study agency in state. (The commuter cost to get a social worker from Georgia to MN a couple of times would kill us.) :-) Not to mention the home study has to be per MN law.

Summit also required a lot of documentation (some notarized, some not) to accompany our application. They will process both and if we come back as viable adoptive parents (no criminal history, etc), they will contact us to set up the appointments.

So that's the next step. We start the home study process which can take anywhere from a month to three months.

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