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