It's been busy lately so we haven't had much time to sit down and add a new post, but we got some great news last Friday. Our homestudy was officially approved by our agency! As a reminder, the homestudy is probably the biggest part of the process it covers everything from our desire to adopt, our backgrounds, health, finances, relationship, etc. Ideally it states that we are reasonably capable of raising a child. It was a very intensive few months and we're very thankful to Jamie, our social worker, for all the effort she put in. Now that we have an approved homestudy, we're moving from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the adoption process. We thought we'd be at this point a few weeks ago, but we had a curve ball late in the homestudy process.
Back in early December we had all of our paperwork in, background checks completed, home study written, and education completed. Then we found out that India recently required all potential adoptive parents to have psychological evaluations completed. It was something that added weeks or months of delays and significant costs to many families in the middle of the process. We were extremely lucky to have a qualified psychologist who could get us in right away. Thank you Ken Waldron! Ken is someone I've known for a long time as he and Carol, his wife, lived right around the corner from my Grandparents. Not to mention I've been friends with his daughter, Katrina, since elementary school. The coincidences don't stop there; Ken and Carol adopted Katrina as an infant from Peru. They are very familiar with the emotional roller coaster ride we've been going through. Ken had worked with adoptive parents when he lived in California, so he was able to get our interviews and personality tests completed and evaluations written up faster than we ever could have hoped.
Jumping back to the process, WACAP and Catholic Charities have agreed that we meet the requirements for the India program and have described that in our homestudy. So, where are we going from here? We are currently working on our I 800A paperwork. This paperwork and our homestudy (along with some other personal documents) get sent along to US immigration. If all goes well, that will be approved about 6 weeks after we submit. So it's likely that we'll be looking at mid-March. Then one more bunch of paperwork gets sent to CARA, India's adoption authority. It's all kind of been a blur so far and it's still overwhelming trying to comprehend what's coming. But we're grateful and excited to have hit our first major milestone!
I don't have any great pictures for this so here are a couple alpacas from when Leah went to the alpaca festival last year.
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