I am so excited to say that our home study is in the final round of revisions/signatures and nearly ready to send to Korea! Along with our home study, we will also be sending our referral acceptance (ATK) paperwork. Our agency is mailing it to us to sign/notarize this week, and then we will send … Continue reading Dossier is ALMOST ready!
Our final home study visit was early Sunday afternoon at a Starbucks. It was short and sweet, more of a formality and confirming everything rather than new information. So now we wait! This will be our default mode for the rest of this process -- hurry up and wait. After talking through the timeline more … Continue reading All home study visits are DONE!
I am beginning to think the recurring theme for the Home Study might be, "Well, that wasn't as hard as I thought it would be." Yesterday was our second home study visit. Once again, I had a plan and that plan did not happen. I thought I would take the boys to Mother's Day Out, … Continue reading Home Study Visit #2
I went from all at peace about the home study to a ball of nerves in about 24 hours. Organization and managing details are not strengths of mine at all. I can usually manage well enough to keep us functioning as a family, but it's not how I would ever choose to create a first … Continue reading All about the first home study visit
We are less than a week away from our first home visit! There isn't a ton we can do to prepare, but we have been going through the house, decluttering, organizing and making sure we meet all the safety standards. A few things they check for: Fire extinguisher on each floor of the house Working … Continue reading Just checking in while we wait
The last week has been a whirlwind of appointments and paperwork, but we are this.close to having everything ready for our first home study visit! Josh and Elliott had physicals last week, and I had mine this week. Jackson is up-to-date on all his medical care, so it was as easy as getting a form … Continue reading Paperwork updates + our first weird encounter
Some good news! The very first step for us with our agency was to submit a short summary of our home study, a family photo and a paragraph about why we want to adopt to ESWS for pre-approval. This isn't required for every family adopting from South Korea, but we are using an out-of-state agency … Continue reading Pre-approval granted!
So we're officially working with a new home study agency. It's wonderful that we found another one so quickly. I'm trying to be really optimistic about that. The new agency requires a lot more from us - including two additional references and applying for a lot of state and federal information that our original agency … Continue reading Round 2
This is a post I can't believe I'm writing already. We fully expect setbacks and twists and turns during the process. It's pretty much par for the course. Today, we learned "Hague compliant" and "Hague accredited" are different things, and that difference is a big deal when adopting from South Korea. We are working with … Continue reading Our First Setback
Five Sewells 