Second Home Visit...Check

Our second and last home visit to be approved for adoption is done!  And we passed!  The next time our adoption specialist is in our house will be when our second child has come home with us and has been living with us for several weeks.  Our house no longer has to be a museum and we can go back to living life at home as normal.  Phew! 

We aren’t fully approved quite yet, however.  We still have to do individual interviews.  We have these interviews scheduled for January 10^th and they will be at the agency office.  I am feeling like the hard part is behind us now and these individual interviews will not be too difficult.  Over my Christmas break I will be working on our profile book and our “Dear Birthparent” letter and then we should be home free.  A giant cloud of stress has been lifted!  Now I can move on to the stress of having 9 adults and 7 children over for dinner tomorrow night!  But, that is a nice, happy stress and I am so happy to be able to have this milestone in our adoption process to celebrate with great friends!

The Next Phase, At Last!

At the end of October I wrote a post when I was very excited about turning in all of our paperwork.  I thought that we were just waiting for our background checks to come back and for my husband to get his physical sent in.  We were waiting for those things, but it also turned out that my daughter’s physical form had a mistake on it and had to be re-done.  So, now a month later…our paperwork is finally, officially DONE!  We are moving on to the next phase at last!  I am so excited because I was seriously starting to think that this day would never come. 

So, what is the next phase, you ask?  Well, we have been assigned a social worker and she will now do a home visit to make sure our house is safe for children and will interview each of us individually about our family history, our life, and our marriage.  I plan to be cleaning like a mad woman for the next week and a half.  This is also great motivation to get some projects finished around the house and get it cleaned for the holidays.  I think there is a good chance we will be officially a “waiting family” by the end of December or beginning of January!

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered!

Today was the day!  I hand delivered all of the paperwork that we have been working on over the past month and a half to our agency.  I have been looking forward to this moment since we started working on the mile-high stack of papers.  Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite a mile, but it had to be close! 

Before dropping everything off, I went to Kinkos to make copies of everything we had done.  I watched as our life in paper went through the copy machine.  There were birth certificates, our marriage certificate, driver’s licenses, social security cards, tax records, shot records for our dogs, the answers to every question about our past asked by the agency, and bunches of papers that we had to sign agreeing with this and granting permission for that.  I then went through the packet of paperwork to make sure everything was there…again.  I think I may have done that ten times before actually handing our hard work over.  I am not sure why.  If something is missing, I can always add it later.  Yet, it was important to me to have it all there and to hand everything over in one big chunk. 

I walked the paperwork in and handed it to the woman at the desk.  I met this woman once before when I came into the agency.  Due to this previous encounter, I knew that she was new.  Do I dare hand over everything about our lives that we have spent so much time compiling to a new employee??  Do I have a choice?  It looked like she was the only one there at the time and I certainly wasn’t going to demand to wait for someone else.  I gave the large manila envelope to her with some hesitation.  But…now… IT IS DONE!!!!!

As excited as I am about this step, it still can’t manage to escape the anxiety that I seem to experience in every step and stage of this process.  We are really doing this…we are really doing this!  I have excitement and anxiety about that.  My anxiety comes from the money, the uncertainty of the unknown, the worry of how our future child will feel about this whole adoption thing.  But, we ARE going to be parents again and we are now closer to that!  I couldn’t be more excited about that!

Is "Good Enough" Good Enough?

I have always felt pretty good about my life.  I rarely questioned whether we were like “everyone else”.  Instead, I pretty much assumed that we were.   I figured that the home lives of our friends were a lot like ours.  Sure, my husband and I have arguments every now and then.  Yes, I lose my patience with my daughter sometimes and need to walk away or give myself a mommy time out.  I am pretty sure this happens to most spouses and most parents from time to time.  Even with these imperfections, I was confident that my life was “normal”.  Entering the paperwork and home study phase of the adoption process, I would have to say that even the most confident person would feel anxiety having someone else judge you and your worthiness of having a child.  Suddenly, my assumption of being like everyone else doesn’t feel so secure anymore.

In mid-September my husband and I went to the information meeting for our adoption agency.  We received a thick envelope of paperwork that we needed to fill out.  Along with the paperwork, we had to get our fingerprints done for an FBI background check, get physicals for ourselves and our daughter, and submit our employment records for our current jobs.  Being a person who likes to get things done quickly, I happily tore into the paperwork the next day.  However, my progress was stalled when I stumbled upon what I would call the “difficult questions” section.  I knew that they would have to ask personal questions, but I didn’t realize it would start in the initial paperwork.  People who have already been through the process will probably tell me that the difficult, personal questions have just begun.  The first question that caused me to pause was, “How often do you and your spouse argue?”  I really have never had any reason to keep track of how often we argue.  And furthermore, what would be a “normal” amount of arguments to have in any given period of time?  The next question was, “What are the major areas of conflict in your relationship?”  Here we ran into a disagreement.  I wanted to just put a couple of things that we argue about more regularly.  That was my interpretation of “major areas of conflict”.  My husband had a different interpretation.  During this process I was thinking that they should include a question saying, did you get into an argument while answering this questionnaire?  Luckily, we did get through it fairly well without too much disagreement, but I wouldn’t call it easy!

I am still working through a lot of this paperwork and I find myself asking am I good enough?  Is my husband good enough?  Is my marriage good enough?  Is our house safe enough?  Are our finances good enough?  Is “good enough” good enough?  Now, instead of assuming that we are like everyone else, I am picturing these perfect-beyond-belief people who are applying to this agency.  I am imagining that next to them our flaws look ridiculously huge and there is no way that they will approve us.  Then, I think about my life from my old vantage point.  I realize that we have a happy, healthy, well-adjusted daughter as proof that, even with our flaws, we are able to provide a good home for another child.  I think that we will probably be approved and then I will move on to be neurotically worried about the next aspect of this process.

In my last post, I said that adoption gives me hope and allows me to take control of the situation back.  I still feel this, but it doesn’t mean that the process will be easy.  I didn’t write this post for sympathy or to have people reassure me that we are great parents or that we are “normal”.  I do still think that we have done pretty well as parents so far and I still feel pretty normal.  I wrote it to share the adoption experience.  I am sure there will be unbelievably hard aspects of this process and unbelievably amazing aspects.  I will try to give an accurate description of what it is like to adopt (for us).