First Homestudy meeting

As nervous as could be, Justin and I headed to Indianapolis late this afternoon for our first homestudy meeting. Even though we have been through this process once before we were still unsure of what this agency would ask/say and how well we would connect with our new social worker. So off we go with butterflies in our belly. As we turned onto the "circle" around Indianapolis it started to sprinkle. About ten miles down the road and five minutes from the agency our drive came to a complete stop. We planned for extra time which was good, but weren't expecting the type of weather we were about to encounter. Torrential down pours, gusty winds of at least 60 mph causing a tree limb to fall within feet of the truck, and dime-nickel size hail. The hail was hitting the truck so hard I thought the windshield was going to crack. We finally made it to our exit (or what we thought was our exit) only to find that the streets were flooded. Cars and trucks were up to there tires in water. All we could do was laugh...really what could we do.

We finally made our way through the traffic and flooded streets to the adoption agency...with a few minutes to spare. Our social worker on the other hand did not. She was about 30 minutes late due to the weather, traffic, and power outages. Besides all of that our meeting went fairly well. She seems really nice and our personalities match. We discussed basic information on why we choose adoption as a way to build our family, how Lydia's adoption went and how she is doing now. We talked about our childhood and our relationships with our parents then and now. That one was really difficult for us. With Lydia's adoption almost everyone "seemed" to be on board. The ones that made negative comments couldn't live without her and the other's just don't come around. For this adoption, no one has really given us their blessing or congratulations. It is really hard for us not knowing if our family is on board with us adopting another child.

I don't know if they think we aren't ready to parent another child, if we aren't financially ready to take on more debt, or exactly what the whole issue is. Everyone just seems to be so involved with my sister and her baby. I don't blame them...we are about to have a "baby" in the family and I couldn't be happier for them, but we need support and encouragement through this process as well. I know they don't fully understand and aren't as educated as we are but they need to see that we can't go through this alone. Anyways, hopefully things will get better as we get farther along in our process and that they actually see that this time it is going to work...pray!

Back to the homestudy, some things have changed since we originally talked to them. We were to do 8-10 hours of training on the Internet (Taiwan is not Hague, but they are wanting us to do everything to Hague standards in case it changes in the middle)and that was it. Our social worker wants us to read two book on attachment and about the birth mothers. I think both of them are great books and will help us out once the child is home. We also have to attend to educational meetings at our agency sometime within the next year. They also mentioned that since this is a new program to the agency they are considering calling it a pilot program which is were each of the fees are reduced. This would help us out tremendously so keep your fingers crossed it gets passed.

We found out a bit more about the country and how they do things (it is still kind of hard to get a direct answer since they just opened the program and they are getting questions from us and then going back to the old agency and then answering our question). The birth mother does pick the family unless it is a waiting child. The waiting child or special needs program is a bit different to. They will send out an email with all of the children available to all of the families in the program. If you are open to a child of that age or with that specific need you send them back an email letting them know you are interested in that child. After a 24 hour period they take all the entries and give more information and a referral to family that said yes that has been waiting the longest. In a way I think it is good, but then again it's going to be hard to see pictures of all of these children thinking could this be the one.

We meet with our social worker again next Tuesday and then she will be doing our home visit following that visit. Keep us, our baby, and his/her birth parents in your prayers.