I just got a message from our social worker that we will have our emailed copy of our homestudy tomorrow afternoon! This is the biggest part of the adoption process, and the most work for us! It is such a relief to cross this off our to-do list for this adoption.
So now what? When we receive our emailed copy we check it over for mistakes, etc and then we forward it to our stateside helper, the amazing paperwork Guru herself Nancy Thornell! Nancy goes over it again, makes any changes that need to be made and then forwards it to the team in our Eastern European country for final approval. Once everyone has approved the rough draft the final homestudies are printed up and notarized along with the social workers license and the agency license. Then the notarized copies are sent off to A New Arrival; the Hague accredited agency who will put their final approval on it. As soon as it is Hague certified it can be sent to immigration to meet up with our I-600A which we filed months ago because one of our boys was turning 16 and the only way to keep him adoptable for us was to file the I-600A before his 16th birthday. Three more copies of the homestudy will be sent off to the state of WI to be appostiled; an appostile is a state level certification that pretty much just says that the notary that signed the document is legitimate. These three copies will become part of our dossier or Paper Baby that we will send to our children’s country once we are ready!
We still have a few documents to complete for our dossier but the homestudy was the most important because it will allow us to apply for grants through many different Adoption Grant organizations. We have exhausted all of our savings and pretty much all of our credit with our last three adoptions so we are counting on fundraising and grants this time. We did not apply for grants with our first two adoptions and then received a $1,500 matching grant with our last adoption because we were at the very end and had luckily been able to come up with most of the funds ourselves. This journey is a little different. First of all we KNOW our kids to be! We have met them and fallen in love with them already. These kids are older kids and at risk of aging out and never having a chance at a family:( Life once these kids age out is not easy. I am not certain of exact numbers so I won’t quote them but I know the rate is very high for these kids to end up as prostitutes, living on the streets begging, or in jail for theft or drugs because they have no other way to survive. We want to give these kids a chance to break the cycle that they are in. They are good kids and with the love and support of family I am confident they are going to do GREAT THINGS!!!
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