Home Visit

First, thank you for your prayers. Our social worker completed our home visit last night, coming over for a bite to eat and staying for 2 hours. As she was leaving, she said she only has to submit her report to her boss, and we're ready to go! But I'll start from the beginning...

After a quick tour of the house, led by our son, she had a few questions for us clarifying our home study questionnaire--about our ethnicity, our finances (can we afford food and clothing?), and why we want to adopt. Prompted by state law, she also asked us if we had considered foster care and adopting from the state. This review was quite simple.

The state requires home studies of prospective adoptive parents to make sure they are prepared for adoption. So our social worker was kind enough to chat with us about adoption and transracial adoption. It was good to learn about her experiences as a parent of biological and transracial children. It was also good to get her advice on creating our profile, talking with birthmoms, and handling turns of events in the adoption process.

I find it interesting and wonderful that God demonstrates his sovereignty through adoption. Those that believe in a god much different than the God I worship--the God who is the I AM, a spirit without a body, one being of three persons, not created but the Creator--stop to marvel at God's control over the placement of children into families. It seems that all praise God for his care in choosing parents for children and children for parents. The matches are beyond circumstance. Too much has to happen to get these families together. So I hear repeatedly from adoptive parents.

The next few days and weeks, I'll be working on the next step: putting together our profile. Even with our social worker's advice and the instruction from our adoption agency, I can't say I'm excited about working on it. I'm not much of a scrap-booker, and choosing the right pictures to show who our family is and then framing them just right will be time consuming. As a bit of a perfectionist, I'll have to take the time to get it perfect.

It's crazy to us that as soon as our profile is ready, we'll be able to adopt. Whoa! The process is so much quicker than I anticipated--for most, a year or two passes before bringing a child home. It usually does not take long for a family to be matched with an African American child--for a birthmom to choose a family or for the agency to find a good match. By choice we'll wait until summer though, as we have my little bro's spring wedding we don't want to miss. That will also add the benefit of a few more months to build up our adoption fund.