BC Boomerang

I got my birth certificate back from the Secretary of State's office and it should be on it's way to the NY Consulate for authentication tomorrow or Tuesday - as soon as I can get an express mail label from the USPS. Next I'll be finalizing our financial statement and adoption petition and getting the rest of our documents ready to be notarized. I'm seeing a glimmer of light at the end of the paperchase tunnel!

Final Homestudy Visit

We had our final homestudy visit today. This time our social worker asked us questions related to our marriage, discipline, etc. She also took a quick tour and did our individual interviews. She really enjoyed the veggies, too! All went well and it was a very pleasant visit. As soon as she gets our reference letters she will begin working on our draft report. We've asked our references to email their letters since we don't know how long our former homestudy agency will take to send our file. We also need to give her a copy of the financial statement that we are preparing for our dossier...better get to work on that!

Veggie Tales

Location: self checkout at Jewel
Time: 3:00 PM
The cell phone rings. It's the social worker saying she's going to be early for our 3:30 homestudy visit. There we are with armloads of raw, unwashed, uncut veggies frantically scanning, sweet talking the self checkout monitor into scanning her discount card for us, and imploring the machine to stop the "unexpected item in bagging area" speech. We race home (at the posted speed limit of course), discussing our strategy on the way. Jacek will wash and cut the veggies as I transfer the pumpkin loaf and cheese block to serving plates. I will pour the blue cheese dressing into the dipping cup and then will shake the excess water from the sliced veggies and arrange prettily on the plate. We were done in 10 minutes flat. I think that's a record. And this was no cheesy veggie tray - we had carrots, celery, mushrooms, red pepper, broccoli and orange cauliflower - all needed slicing except the carrots. 10 minutes. We rock!

Flights & Fingerprints

We were to have our second homestudy visit on Friday morning but Jacek's flight was cancelled and he couldn't get in until after lunch. So we resceduled for next Saturday. We did get our State fingerprints done. Since we opted to not get our foster care license we had to have them done and sent to our homestudy agency. DCFS won't share. So that was our fourth fingerprinting - only one more to go for immigration - too funny! :)

In Illinois, when adopting internationally you are required to get a foster care license unless both parents are traveling. Many families get it anyway just in case at the last minute only one parent can travel. Well, our new SW put it this way - if something happens to one of us that is serious enough to keep us from traveling to China, the other would not want to go anyway. In the unlikely event that did happened we could delay travel, therefore we decided not to get the license.

Reset

Wow! The difference was like night and day! Our new case worker from our new homestudy agency came over on Saturday and she's already spent more time with us than our former social worker did in all 4 of our required meetings - and already knows more about us - and has already given us 3 times the information than we got before. And you know what? The 3 hours flew by! Our new SW is great! We are so happy we changed agencies. Now the HS is positive and informative, as we think it should be. Our next meeting is Friday morning. I'll be working this week on getting documentation together for our file. It feels great to finally relax and know we are on the road again.