I'm proud to say we survived our first Homestudy visit for our adoption yesterday. Our social worker is supposed to make 4 visits--one each of individual counseling, one of couples counseling, and one sort of miscellaneous. Our first visit turned out to be the miscellaneous one. He decided to do the home/safety inspection. We were not expecting this and kind of panicked, having done nothing to childproof our home. I mean we don't store our knives at floor level or have one smoke detector for the entire house or anything, but a little advance warning would have made me feel better. As it turns out, he only wanted to see three things before his 3rd visit: a lock on the jacuzzi cover, cabinet latches, and socket covers. No problems there. Phew!
We seem to be a bit ahead of schedule (well, MY schedule) on paperwork. The only things we have left for our homestudy is our medical forms (appointments on Friday) and our birth certificates. I'll have to get the birth certs in person, which is actually a good thing since I've heard the mail route is long and unpredictable. Kevin was conveniently born right here in Orange County so the clerk's office is just a city over. I was born in LA County which is a bit further, but not much. We got our marriage certificates with no problems. We were married in Santa Clara County (up North, in San Jose--a 6 hour drive from here) so I did those by mail. There were warnings all over the place and a promise that it would take at least 3 weeks and blah blah blah. So I sent off my request and check by USPS with tracking and included a pre-paid FedEx envelope with a GIANT note saying "PLEASE RETURN DOCUMENTS IN THIS ENVELOPE--IT IS PRE-PAID." There were numerous warnings about how if you didn't include a SASE the skies would open and God himself would smite you on the spot, and enclose an extra $20 if you wanted express mail or tracking number, so I sent the FedEx envelope. Well, about a week later I got my 3 copies of our marriage certificate in a regular business-sized envelope with a 39 cent stamp. I don't know what happened to my FedEx envelope, but hey, I'm not going to complain too hard. At least I got them in an expedient manner. And really, in the enormous cost of any adoption--what's an extra 8 bucks?
Posted by Shelby at August 22, 2006 11:37 PM