Holy Paperwork Batman!

Well this week has been exciting… besides that I cut myself with a butter knife and needed stitches… we had our Interview with Lilliput Children’s Services.  Now you ask what the heck does that mean? 

Well it means we sat down with a social worker and went over some basic questions such as why adoption and if we had any infertility issues.  There were a bunch of other questions but the entire interview took less than an hour! Rowan went with us so they got to meet her and see how we parent. Now what?

Well we have 1 simple step and 1 not so simple step.  the simple one is we have to find time to attend 9 classes in Sacramento on Tuesday nights, probably January to March.  Plus CPR certification. This is 100 bucks for both of us for the 9 weeks and then 50 bucks for my CPR, KC’s work pays or his. The more difficult step is the PAPERWORK!

Wow they have a lot of things… some simple not so simple.  Here is a list: An application with references from people you aren’t related to, Live Scan Clearance( Fingerprints and full FBI background check, this is 100 bucks each), Criminal Record Statement, 57 question Questionnaire each, an autobiography,  a disaster plan for our house, verification of auto insurance, proof of 300,000 in liability home insurance, DMV driving records, both self and Doctor’s health reports, TB tests, Employment Verification, Financial Statements, Pet Immunizations, and Verification of Marriage. Whew!

Well since we have time before our classes we are going to do our best to get the rest of it done.  Oh and the fun part is we get to create a  Family Book that contains pictures of us and talks about who are as a family.  Guess I’m going to have to find that inner scrapbooker! 

I’m hoping to make a digital book and share it will all of you.

And it begins…

This blog is going to be my attempt at keeping a log of our journey into adoption and God leading us to our son.  Some of the thoughts here will simply be an expression of our(my) feelings good and bad, others will be a timeline, and some explaining to those of you not familiar with the process what is going on.  Please be patient with me a I was never much of a journal person… but I will  do my best to keep  this up to date.

We started the journey last night by going to orientation at Lilliput Children’s Services,  this agency specializes in what they call  “special needs” adoption, but really that just means any child that is in the foster care system.   We chose to go this route for a few reasons: we are using the agency because they have access to all the eligible children in the state foster care system and we will have a social worker who is our advocate and will have a limited number of cases. They also require we take 9 weeks of courses to prepare ourselves for this journey, as well as offer support groups for once the adoption is complete.

Why foster to adopt?  Well there are a few reasons: The most obvious that private and international adoption are EXPENSIVE. (While I worked at Wells Fargo we reimbursed adoption expenses so I have seen what it can cost)   Lilliput charges us $100 for our classes and we have to be fingerprinted thru LiveScan and have TB tests, we have some modifications to our home we will have to make and finally approx 500 bucks to finalize the adoption.  Some of these costs will be reimbursed to us by the state as well as while our child is living with us but still technically in the Foster Care system we will receive a monthly allotment to care for him.  Also we want to be able to say we helped clean up our own “house”, we have no problem with international adoption but feel we need to take care of kids close to home before we can go save the world.

Ok that is all for now…