Home Study Interviews - DONE!

Over the past month, we have been meeting with our social worker to complete four interviews as part of our home study. We finally finished our last one yesterday with her visiting our home to see where Baby Craft will live! 

We have been asked so many questions that I didn't even know could be asked, many we didn't really know the answers to, and some we were confident in answering. We shared our reasoning behind adoption and how we plan on our lives changing once our baby arrives. We discussed safety and school options. We learned a little bit more about the adoption process. We also learned about our compatibility from our Prepare Enrich tests we took before the interviews (we're SUPER compatible, by the way)!

Many people have asked what our next steps are. We are currently in the "hurry up and wait" phase of the adoption process. We have finished pretty much all of the parts we can do. Our next steps look like this:

• Our social worker finalizes the writing part of our home study. She sends it off to 3 other people to review for grammatical errors and such before finalization. Once they've reviewed it, she sends it to us to review before submitting it for approval. During this time, Coley and I will be working on creating our profile book. This is essentially a Shutterfly book that will go around with the social workers to share with birth moms.
• Once the home study has been approved, we pay $7000 for the "admittance fee." Then, we meet with the director of domestic adoption. She will go over our profile book preview and give us the go-ahead to print if it's all good or we'll get notes on what to change. She'll discuss with us one more time about our preferences for our child and our adoption before putting us live on the website.
• Once we've gone through all of this, we go live on the website! This means we are a "waiting family" and we are being shown to birth moms for them to decide to choose us for their child. During this time, we can also begin applying for grants and such to help fund the adoption if we qualify for any. The giant check of $20,000 is due when they call us with our baby! 

The only thing we can do in this stage of the process is pray for the birth families and our baby, and hope it all happens soon! We are so close to having a sweet baby in our arms. While we have no idea how long the waiting process will take, we know that we are at the point where it could be any time!