Ah, the oh-so-dreaded home study.  Prior to actively pursuing adoption, I had heard several negative things about a home study, and so had a decent amount of anxiety about completing it.   The home study is a catch-all term used to refer to your home assessment (checking to make sure you meet the basic safety needs), interviews by your case worker, as well as interviews completed by a third party. 

The home safety assessment is pretty straightforward and is the first basic hurdle to adoption.  For the most part, they want to make sure that you have a fire extinguisher and smoke detectors, locks on all cleaning products and medications, and all of the outlets covered.  If you have a pool or a trampoline things get a little more complicated regarding safety essentials.  This part is taken care of generally prior to moving forward with the interviews.

The caseworker interviews consist of surface level questions done in the home.  Basically, the caseworkers want to get a feel for what life is like in your home.  They may ask questions like, “What does your family do for fun?” or, “What is your support network like?” or, “Do you own any weapons and where are they stored?”.  You don’t need to stress about this too much, though.  Just be yourself, try to relax, and know that your caseworker is generally happy that you want to adopt one of the children from CPS.  Caseworkers do not want kids to stay under the care of the state indefinitely, but rather want to find them the ideal forever home.  Their goal is not to dismiss you, but to help you to find kids that will be the best fit for your family.  I know it is hard to believe that in the moment, but trust me – caseworkers are thrilled when a child receives a permanent placement. 

The final step is a little more involved and consists of an interview and inspection from a third party company.  Ours was scheduled in the afternoon on a day prior to me working that evening.  I naively assumed that it would take less than an hour, and it ended up taking 2-3 hours.  Thankfully, a coworker stayed late so that we could complete our interview without interruption.  A woman showed up at our house with her laptop for the assessment.  She spoke to us first together, then each of us individually, and then together again at the end.  She wrote down everything that we said for her report. 

The questions were much deeper and difficult to answer than those asked by our caseworker.  We were asked questions like:

·      What are the best and worst character traits of your mate and of yourself?
·      What is your biggest concern regarding adoption?
·      How would you handle discipline with your children?
·      How do you handle stress?
·      How did your parents discipline you as a child? 
·      What was the environment of your household     like when you were growing up and how did that affect you?
·      How do you handle arguments with your mate? 

These questions made us search deeper than we had initially planned.  This was an incredibly important step for the two of us as we began to truly count the cost of moving forward with adoption.   The questions forced us to have conversations that we did not even realize were necessary.  In the same way that premarital counseling allows couples to remove the rose-colored glasses, this home study made us truly examine our hearts and see some areas that still needed work. 

A Christian pastor once said, “When we are bumped, we spill what we are filled with.”  If the hurt of our childhood or our concerns about our mate are not dealt with early on, these will inevitably “spill” over onto our kids.  No amount of planning and preparation will ever make you a perfect adoptive parent, but dealing with the dark areas of our past will allow more of the love of Christ to shine through us to our children. 

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Program...

I realize that this is a departure from our adoption journey, but I feel that it must be said.  A common theme that is pervasive in articles posted to social media is lists of things you should never say to a parent of one child, a parent of multiples, a working mother, a stay at home mother, etc.  I often try to read these articles to familiarize myself with ways I may be unintentionally offensive.  However, the other side to this issue is that we must try to not be so thin-skinned.  What I mean is we should attempt to see the heart behind what was said, rather than focusing on the poor phrasing or word choice that was used.  This does not give license to simply say whatever pops in our head and be immediately forgiven of any harm that it causes. 

Examples work best for me, so let me share some potentially hurtful things people have said to me concerning adoption, and how I try to interpret these words in the best way possible. 

11)   Don’t you want any of your OWN children? Or slightly reworded: Do you have any of your own children?

This hurts many adoptive parents because each road to adoption is so deeply personal.  There may be fertility issues, there may be financial issues, or it may simply be something that they feel called to do.  The parents will share this information if they feel that you should to know it.  If someone feels called to adopt, get excited for her because she is helping to make one less orphan. 

As an adoptive parent, I don’t get offended by this one.  I know these are my kids that I worked super hard for.  I chose them and did everything that I had to do to bring them home.  I take this opportunity to educate my friends and family that these are my own kids.  No need to spew hateful statements. 

22)   You know, many of these kids are “messed up” from birth based on genetics. 

This has totally been said to me, multiple times and I still internally scream a bit.  Messed up?  Seriously?!  Depending on the situation, I want to say, “And your bio kids are SO great?”.  But alas, I am a Christian and cannot say such words.  I really shouldn’t think them, but hey, God is still working on me. 

Anyway, try to get at the heart behind the comment.  Your friend or family member is saying this journey will be really tough… are you prepared?  This is something every potential foster/adoptive parent must assess.  Am I ready?  Do I have a correct view of what parenting will be like?  Do I have a good support system?  Have I truly counted the cost?  If you are called to adoption, please understand, these kids come with baggage.  I forget sometimes that my kids have gone through serious hurt in their years before we met.  It has not been easy, but few things that are truly valuable come without a struggle.

33)   Don’t you know that you will never love these children like you would love a biological child?

This one is particularly interesting to me.  Is there some way to quantify love?  I am unaware of any such tool.  In addition, I have known plenty of biological parents who “loved” their kids, but put their addictions ahead of the needs of their families.  Similarly, let us not forget that the reason many of these children are up for adoption is that their biological parents neglected or abused them.  Being a biological parent most certainly does not make you love someone more.  We chose each day who we will demonstrate love to.  God’s power working through me allows me to love in tremendous ways. 

Now, how should we as adoptive parents see the heart behind this statement?  I feel that what this person is really saying is that they love their biological child in a deep and unexplainable way.  They may feel that it would be really tough to love someone outside of their family that much.  Thank that friend for their concern, but let me tell you from experience, I love my kids.  I do not have biological kids to do a side-by-side comparison with, but I guarantee you that I love them in a way that I never thought possible.  I’m sure that there are differences with bio kids, but I find that unimportant when I look into the precious faces of my children and thank God that He entrusted me to care for them.

There are more of these phrases, which I would like to explore later, but for now, I will simply thank God for concerned friends and family.  They care about us and want what is best for us, even if they have trouble articulating it.  Adoption may be weird to those that do not feel called to it, but I have always rather enjoyed being a weirdo.

Are You Gonna Be My Girl?

In the last post, I explained how my husband and I met these adorable kids at a CPS event and requested information about them.  Our original caseworker, let’s call her, Marissa, left the agency, unbeknownst to us.  A few weeks passed and we were given a new caseworker that we will call June.  June called us on the phone and chatted with us.  She told us about a few sibling groups that were available for adoption.  All of them met the criteria that we were looking for, but we decided to hold off on submitting our home study for them until we heard about what happened with the kids that we met at the event, Z & H. 

June had not been made aware of our interest in these kids, even though we were told that she had been.  Truth be told, we just wanted to know a little more about their story and any other information that they could provide us.  Another week or so passed, and I received an email that June had submitted our home study for Z and H.  WHAT?!  Submitted our home study?!  That’s not what we asked for… we just wanted some information on the kids.  We called her as soon as we got the email to ask why we skipped the initial step.  June went on to explain that all the home studies were due the next day and we had to submit ours to even be considered. 

The way that this whole process works is basically as follows.  Step one: Hear about/inquire about certain children available for adoption.  Your caseworker usually tells about kids that are available for adoption and meet your specifications.  He or she gives you, the prospective parents, whatever information they are privy to in order to assist in decision-making.  Step two: You submit your home study.  This is all of your paperwork as well as the outside agency’s home study assessment (which I will discuss in a later post).  Step three: The home studies are reviewed by a board (from CPS, I would guess) of individuals who narrow it down to the top three families that seem like they would be a good fit.  Step four: The caseworkers for those three families meet together with this board to decide on a top choice for the kid(s).  Step five: The top family is notified that they have been chosen and then decide if they want to proceed with the adoption process.  The other two families are not made aware that they made the top three.

This is not the end of the journey, nor does this make anything official.  From that decision, there are still several steps to ensure that the family has a better idea what they are getting into before they even meet the kids.  This process is aimed to protect the privacy of the children (by not making their records available to more people than those that would need to see them) as well as their emotions (by not having the family meet them yet).

At this point in our journey, we just knew that our home study was submitted and we were waiting.  Our home study was submitted at the beginning of March and most of March passed without any news.  We trusted God that if this was what He desired we would get chosen.  

Someone Like You

After we finished our classes, there will still several small things to check off of our list.  We completed those around the end of January and received our license.  Our caseworker said that we should go to an event called the Heart Gallery. This event was to take place the first weekend in February and I was scheduled to work, but thankfully a friend took the shift for me.  I just had a feeling that we needed to be there.

Every year at Heart Gallery, many prospective adoptive parents are invited to come and hang out with children ages 5 and up that are legally free for adoption.   The idea is that you mingle with these kids and see if there are any “sparks”, which help to create an interest in adoption. There are tables where you can find out more information about the kids and speak to some caseworkers about the process.  CPS encourages parents to not spend too long talking to any particular child, but to chat for a bit and then move on to another child.  It is a strange, but wonderful activity.  My husband jokingly referred to it as speed dating for adoption. 

The younger kids just think the day is a fun festival—they can play games, color, win prizes and dance.  The older kids have figured out that this may be one of their last chances to get adopted and they try to make themselves more marketable.   After we got our lunch, we looked for a place to sit down.  A 16-year-old girl named Jamie smiled at us and waved and we felt like we should sit down with her.  Jamie was beautiful and polite and very set on trying to sell herself to us.  We had already determined that 10 years old was the oldest age that we were open to.  While my heart broke into pieces for this girl, we knew that it was important to stick to the boundaries that we had set and prayed about.  It has been almost 2 years since that day and I still pray that God gave her the perfect forever family.

After lunch, we wandered around and watched the kids playing together.  We saw these two young siblings coloring and decided to join them.  Phil talked with the little boy, who was 10-years-old, about basketball and LeBron James.  I talked to the little girl, who was 5, about cartoons and watched her color these little coloring sheets.  After she colored each page for exactly 10 seconds, she had me help her put them into her drawstring backpack that she got earlier in the day.  They were so sweet and so tiny, and we went to get more information on them.  A caseworker gave us a piece of paper with their photo and their names on it (and the girl’s name was misspelled). 

We went home and immediately emailed our caseworker about our interest in these kids.  We stuck their photo on our fridge and I showed it to friends and family as if these were already our children.  For those that don’t know me, I am a sharer.  As soon as I have good news, I want everyone to know.  I tend to rush into things as mentioned in an earlier post, and although I had still heard nothing from our caseworker, I really felt like these were “our kids”.  After waiting a week without a response from our caseworker, we emailed again.  We contacted CPS and found out that our caseworker had left the agency.  This occurrence is not uncommon in this type of work, as rates of burnout are exceptionally high, but it left us pretty bummed out.  So, we waited patiently (well, maybe not all that patiently) until we were assigned a new caseworker. 

To be continued…

For more information about adopting teens

https://adoption.com/whats-the-point-of-adopting-a-17-year-old-kid

Also, some statistics (credit: https://msw.usc.edu/mswusc-blog/adoption-infographic/)

Taking Care of Business

When we had the first home visit from CPS, I seriously freaked out in preparation.  I did all of those things that I never, ever normally do.  I scrubbed the grout in our kitchen floor, cleaned the windows, and dusted anything that would hold still.  My husband worked to install safety locks on the bathroom cabinets, put smoke detectors in every room, and locks for the medications.  We had to get a plumbing/gas inspection, buy a fire extinguisher, have that inspected, and create a fire escape plan to be posted in our house.  

Most of these things were relatively easy and cost very little.  Just as a side note to those going through the process- let the companies know why you need these inspections.  In our case, this simplified the inspection and one of the companies charged us nothing because they were so excited about what we were doing.  Don’t let this overwhelm you, just ask the other parents in your class how they did it.  Every class has that one family that is ahead of the game – find them and become friends with them.

One of the steps of the class was to make a “Life Book”, the style of which was left to our discretion.  The purpose of the book was to help the kids find out a little about their forever family before they moved in.  Most families did this like a scrapbook with a few captions on their pictures.   I chose to use a website called mypublisher.com and made a book that was the story of us. 

Each chapter (and I use that word loosely as each was 1-2 pages) was about a different aspect of our life.  Example – chapter 1 was about Phil and me as kids, chapter 2 was about our house, chapter 3 was about our pets, etc.  Each page had photos of our family, our neighborhood, our church, and activities we like to do.  I loved the idea of making it like a story and the last page talked about how our family was missing something important… them. I talked about how we prayed and waited for a really long time to be given just the right kids.  We were only required to make one Life Book, but we made three: one book for each child as well as one that we would keep nice, because like the last post states… kids destroy things.  To this day, my daughter will frequently grab this book to read as her bedtime story.  I love that she smiles when she hears about how much we went through to adopt them.

The last page of our Life Book

Oh yeah, I said one book for EACH child… as in we were planning to adopt two children.  I forgot to mention how during this time, our plans changed from one child to two children.  This was mostly my idea, but my wonderful husband went along with it.  Bless him. 

As a nurse I was required to take a Human Growth and Development class as a prerequisite course.  During the course, I remember studying Erikson’s Stages of Development and something that my instructor said stuck with me.  The first stage of development is “trust vs. mistrust” and she explained how as long as a child has someone that they can trust from an early age, it helps them to progress in their development.  This was the thought behind adopting siblings.  They will have someone that knows their life experiences and has been with them through everything.  In addition, the majority of children in CPS are a part of a sibling group.  Initially, CPS tries to adopt them all together, but if it seems unlikely, these siblings will be separated, sometimes forever, from the only connection that they have with their past.  We thank God that our children were able to stay together and see each other grow through the stages of life.