Homestudy

The purpose of this blog is to document the adoption journey for ourselves, friends, and family. I also think that it is a way to educate people about the Russian international adoption process through our experiences. So here we go…
I had mentioned earlier that we had to find an agency other than CHI to do our homestudy. A homestudy for adoption is the same as the homestudy for being a foster parent. You basically meet with a social worker, provide a billion documents, and have your home inspected to make sure you are fit to be parents (never mind the fact that we have two healthy and happy children in our home currently). So any way you hope to have a social worker that is not only competent but one that is also friendly and trustworthy as he/she will know more about you than many of your closest friends. After making some phone calls and speaking with a family in Macomb that recently completed an adoption from Vietnam, we decided to use LifeLink which has offices in Peoria and the Quad Cities. We sent our application to them on May 19th. As a quick side note, on Sunday, May 18th Justin and I contacted the people that would be asked to write letters of reference for us. It was fun and surprisingly emotional to share our news with close friends, but it is a good thing we did. Three days later on May 21st our references got forms from LifeLink to fill out on our behalf.