Individual Interview #1

Well, a couple weeks has passed and things continue to progress on the adoption front, though of course not as quickly as we wish. I know we won't be ready to go until Theresa is done with her school next September but that doesn't make me any less impatient. Like always, I want stuff done yesterday.

Anyhow, I had my individual interview with our social worker last Friday. The questions were much more in depth than in the first sit-down that Theresa and I had several weeks ago. Basically, we started from the beginning of my life and came all the way to the present day. I guess it was the stuff that you would expect her to ask of me in order to find out if I would be a suitable parent. She wanted to know about my parents, how it was being raised in my family, what my relationship was like with each parents growing up, what it is like now, who did the discipling, how the discipline was handled, what my relationships were like with my brothers both then and now, etc, etc, etc. We also talked about several of the issues that shaped my life during my teenage years and how those times have influenced who I am to this day. Then, of course, we talked at length about my relationship with Theresa, how it started, what attracted me to her, what I thought her strengths and weaknesses were, how we work through issues in our marriage, yada, yada, yada. I actually enjoyed the interview in the sense that it really made me think about some of those issues from my past that I probably never really realized had shaped me as much as they have. Maybe the field of social work isn't quite as "touchy/feely", feel-good as I thought. It was amazing how she was able to read what I had previously written and listen to the things I said and really put things into words that I hadn't been exactly able to come up with previously. Then again, maybe it was her 20-some years of experience in listening to people just like me and perhaps my life isn't quite as far out there as I sometimes think it is! :)

For those keeping score, I failed miserably in my task to get our paper work filled out and turned in. I had done absolutely none of it. However, after feeling bad about myself, I sat down for several hours this past weekend and did nearly all of the paper work. I think I signed and initialed more papers than I did for my mortgage. My hand was quite sore by the end of it all. A quick trip to Champaign this week allowed me to hit-up a free notary (thanks, Deb!) so most of the paper work is ready to go. Theresa just has to fill out a couple of her forms and we should be good to go. Those forms don't include two of the major federal forms for the USCIS, the I-600 and I-600A, which will be completed closer towards the end of our homestudy process to ensure they don't expire before our little girl comes home. We also don't have our medical physicals done yet either. South Korea has a weight requirement that says all prospective adoptive parents must be no more than 30% over their ridicuously low average weight for your height. They must be using gymnists and marathon runners to get their average weights because I can't believe that the "average" male at 6' 3" shoud be 188 pounds. Anyhow, I've got a bit of weight to lose before I'm within their guidelines so there is no sense in rushing into my physical yet. I think if I managed to go the entire month of January without a Diet Coke, I should be able to knock off these few pounds that I need to lose, right? Right!

Anyway, that's it for me. Next up is Theresa's interview, which I think it coming up later this week or sometime next week. I'm sure she'll get the same type of interegation that I got and then it will be another joint interview at the adoption office. The final interview then will be at our home. I'm not sure about the timeline for these last two meetings but I assume they will be within the next month or so. I can't say that I have much free-time for the next 4-6 weeks but I'm sure we'll find some time.

Thanks for reading along and for all the prayers. God bless!!

-PMD

We met our SW and have a giant stack of papers

I'm sorry it's been so long since we've updated the blog. I guess we're not off to a great start but I promise we will do better. There really hasn't been a whole lot of news to update recently. One of the great aspects of a South Korean adoption is that we are not required to gather documents into a formal dossier to be sent to Korea. Instead, once a couple fills out the formal application for adoption, you are immediately placed on the waiting list and the clock starts ticking. Because of this, we are able to take our time with paperwork and do everything at a bit more leisurely pace. This is different than many counties (e.g. China) where you have to gather, complete, sign, notarize, and ship dozens of formal documents from your adoption agency, your state government, the countless federal agencies to the adoption country before you ever get put on "the list." (Our case was a bit different because we just needed to tell them that we were ready to restart the process. They back-dated our time on the list to when we first re-initiated contact with the agency, which was sometime in mid-February.) That isn't to say that we don't still have a mountain of paperwork that has to be filled out. We can just take our time doing it.

Anyway, so what's been going on with our process? Well, we had our first meeting with our case worker on April 9. It was our first time to meet her and both of us enjoyed our time with her. The meeting covered about what you would expect for an initial meeting. We spent quite a bit of time going over all the basics of the Korean adoption, which we had mostly remembered from the process two years ago. We were particularly pleased to learn that we would, in fact, be able to request a girl because we already have a boy in the home. We thought that would be the case but it is always good to get that confirmation. We also went over all the stuff like the fees, the wait time, and all the training that would be required of us before the referral. It turns out that we do not have to go through the full-day training course that we did a few years ago because that certificate is still valid. However, we are still required to do about 4 or 5 online training courses. I don't know anything about those courses or how long they take but I'll be sure to update as we go through them. We also got a giant pile of papers that we have to compelte. Because Korean adoptions are finalized in the US six months after the child comes here, we are required to have a foster-child license from the IL Depart. of Children and Family Services. That alone requires a bunch of paper work. Then we have forms for the agency, doctor's forms, background checks, fingerprinting applications, and a house exacuation plan. That doesn't even include the federal immingration forms that we will fill out later (with a hefty check, I might add...) I'm supposed to have a good chunk of them filled out by the time I go for my individual interview in a few weeks. We'll see if that actually happens.

Once those formalities got out of the way, we got down to a little business about Theresa and me. Most of the stuff we discussed was pretty easy - how did we meet, what do we enjoy most about being parents, why do we want to adopt, why adopt internationally, how do our families feel about adoption, so on and so forth. I imagine that most of the heavy questioning will come during our individual interviews that will take place over the next couple weeks.

That's a pretty quick summary of where we are at this point. The social worker feels that our wait for a girl will probably be somewhere in the 18-month range for the referral and travel will happen 4-5 months after that. That's pretty much what we had assumed so as it stands now, I hope we'll have a referral by Thanksgiving 2010 and be traveling sometime in Spring 2011. Those dates seem so far away but somehow, the calendar already says 2009. How did that happen? It sure would be nice to have her home for Christmas next year........

Happy Easter and God Bless!
-PMD