Jodi Speaks Her Mind

Adoption Process - Week 2 8/23/2004

We are now into the start of week 3, but I’ll see if I can remember everything we did last week. It’s all been happening so fast!!

Home Study:

One of our major goals for Week 2 was to get through the Autobiography portion of the Home Study requirements. This turned out to be 16 pages long single-spaced. Most of it we were able to complete together but portions of it had to be done individually, as Steve and I had to tell about our parents, childhoods, schooling, and life in general up to and including the marriage. It was not a negative thing to do, as it helps you to begin to look at how you were parented and how that has influenced your own attitudes towards family and parenting. All in all, I’m glad it’s done but do not regret having to do it.

We sent our the requests for our letters of reference needed for the Home Study certification. We have asked a couple of relatives and some friends to write letters of reference for us. They have a couple of weeks to send them in, and they get sent directly to the social worker and are confidential. Obviously, we hope we will get good recommendations from everyone but also want them to be honest if they have concerns. Perhaps those concerns can be brought to our attention and we can address them since we all have blind spots regarding our own strenths and weaknesses. Thanks to those of you who agreed to do this for us. We really appreciate it!

Steve already mentioned one of the toughest parts of the adoption process, which is narrowing down the specifics on the child or children you prefer to adopt. You have to consider if you’ll accept medical diagnoses and if so, how severe. Would you take siblings or unrelated children or do you just want one? Do you want a boy or a girl, etc.? It doesn’t sound that bad in theory but wading through it all was much harder than we expected. Through the process, we learned about different motivations for adopting internationally. We concluded that our goal is to “start our family” and not necessarily to “rescue as many sad, neglected orphans as possible”. We are not adopting out of pity or a sense of charity but more out of selfishness. We want a family.

Education:

We received the books that I ordered in week 1 and I felt the most important one to start is the one titled Toddler Adoption. Toddlers are at a unique stage of development that brings with it special problems in addition to those inherent to adoption. Most books discuss two types of adoption: infant adoption and the adoption of “older children”, which is usually referring to school age. The toddler age is often entirely overlooked, so this book should be extremely helpful in preparing us for the special needs of our new child. We also signed up to attend a one-day training seminar for adoptive parents that will take place in September.

Dossier (the Ukraine paperwork):

We are awaiting our first batch of documents to sign that will get the ball really rolling on that front. We got good news last week that the representative in Arizona who processes the initial USCIS approval (which ultimately allows for us to bring the child into the U.S. once adopted) does so in a very timely manner - i.e. weeks or months faster than other states! The bad news is that we also learned that the Home Study Certification can take longer in Arizona because of a delay policy having to do with the judges who formalize the Certification. And - of course - the Home Study Certification is a required element for the USCIS approval. In any case, we are still aiming for March or April to travel to Ukraine to adopt our little boy.