Different Trips to the Same Place

They say the waiting is the hardest part of adoption. It's certainly a hurry-up-and-wait kind of process. Hurry up and get all the paperwork completed, then wait for your home visit. Hurry up and get the house cleaned, then meet the social worker. Hurry up and finalize the paperwork for the home study, then wait for different groups of people to approve it. That's where we are right now. Our home study paperwork is in the hands of our agency. It will (hopefully) soon make its way to the licensing agent, then the judge. These folks have to approve it, then it's a hurry-up-and-wait for a birth mother to like our biography book. We'll keep everyone posted as we move along, but in the meantime, we thought we'd share with you something that the director of our agency shared with us during our home study class back in September. We found it very touching:

Different Trips to the Same Place
Author Unknown

Deciding to have a baby is like planning a trip to Australia. You've heard it's a wonderful place; you've read many guidebooks and feel certain that you're ready to go. Everyone you know has traveled there by plane. They say it can be a turbulent flight with occasional rough landings, but you can look forward to being pampered on the trip. 

So you go to the airport and ask the ticket agent for a ticket to Australia. All around you, excited people are boarding planes for Australia. It seems there's no seat for you; you'll have to wait for the next flight. Impatient, but anticipating a wonderful trip, you wait---and wait---and wait. Flights to Australia continue to come and go. People say silly things like, "Relax. You'll get on a flight soon." 

After a long time, the ticket agent tells you, I'm sorry, we're not going to be able to get you on a plane to Australia. Perhaps you should think about going by boat. "By BOAT!" you say. "Going by boat will take a very long time and it costs a great deal of money. I really had my heart set on going by plane." So you go home and think about not going to Australia at all. You wonder if Australia will be as beautiful if you approach it by sea rather than by air. But you have long dreamed of this wonderful place, and finally you decide to travel by boat. 

It is a long trip, many months over many rough seas. No one pampers you. You wonder if you will ever see Australia. Meanwhile, your friends have flown back and forth to Australia two or three more times, marveling about each trip. Then one glorious day, the boat docks in Australia. 

It is more exquisite than you ever imagined, and the beauty is magnified by your long days at sea. You have made many wonderful friends during your voyage, and you find yourself comparing stories with others who also traveled by sea rather than by air. People continue to fly to Australia as often as they like, but you are only able to travel once, perhaps twice. Some say things like, "Oh, be glad you didn't fly. My flight was horrible; traveling by sea is so easy."

You will always wonder what it would have been like to fly to Australia. Still, you know you are blessed with a special appreciation of Australia, and the beauty of Australia is not the way you get there, but in the place itself.

Home Visit

So, today was the day the social worker visited our house. I've been stressing about this day from the beginning of this process. Everyone we know who has adopted told us that the home visit isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be. There's just something nerve-wracking, though, about someone coming into your home to judge it...and YOU...to determine if this is a good place to raise a child.

We spent the last 3 days cleaning the house from top to bottom. Our house is certainly not dirty, but it is lived in...it looks like there are two people and two weiner dogs living in it! Dishes sometimes live in the sink for a day or two before they make it to the dishwasher, our living room is littered with dog toys, and we've been known to have stray socks left on the floor of the bedroom.  Not today! The house almost looks more like a show home than a lived-in home. All the throw blankets are folded neatly on the couch and ottoman, the guest room isn't storing an assortment of off-season clothing strewn across the bed, and the office (which also serves as the dogs' bedroom) is cleaner than the day we moved in.

The social worker from our adoption agency showed up around 4pm, for what we assumed would be a 2 hour meeting or so. (That's what all the paperwork said.) She sat with us in the living room and did the "interview" part of the visit first. In this interview, she asked us basic biographical questions (dates of birth and marriage, number of siblings, parents' occupations, etcc.) as well as questions that probed deeper (what our childhoods were like, what our relationships with our siblings are like, why we decided to start dating each other, and ultimately why we decided to marry each other).  We had to talk about how we think our lives will change when we get a baby, how we plan to discipline our child, why we each thought the other person would be a good parent, and why we want to be parents in the first place.  We had to describe our infertility status for the third time with this agency (in short: 5 years married, no baby, but no tests to determine why).

The interview portion of the visit lasted just about an hour. Then it was time for the tour. The social worker checked to make sure that we had a smoke detector within 10 feet of each bedroom door (easy to comply with, since that's what our apartment management company needs to comply with their insurance policy), a fire extinguisher and carbon monoxide detector on each floor of the house, and a room separate from ours for the baby (we will be converting our guest room).  If we had weapons or a pool (we have neither), she woulld have also checked to make sure that we were takig proper precautions to secure those.  The social worker looked in each room of the house, but moved quickly through the tour. All in all, she only took about 15 minutes to check our home. 

Overall, it was a stressful day or two leading up to our visit, but I have to agree with others who say that the actual visit wasn't nearly as bad as I had worked it up to be in my head. From here, we each have  to have a physical. Once that paperwork is in our agency's hands, the social worker will draft our home study document. We wil review the document, then the agency staff reviews it to make sure we pass. It is then submtted to the state of Indiana for review as a petition to adopt. Once it is submitted to the state, the agency wil begin showing our biography book to potential birth mothers.

Thank yuo all for the incredible outporing of love, prayers, good thoughts, and well wishes during this entire process. You all have no idea how amazing it is to know that we have so many people supporting us through this long, emotional process.

Love, Stephanie

P.S. I've hard from some folks that they "stalk" the blog almost daily...We'll try to be better at updating more regularly!!