Homestudy visits completed and the plan

The social worker came to the house yesterday to do our last homestudy visit. Now she has to write an 8-10 page paper on our family and why we will be good adoptive parents.
After that is completed we can hopefully send out all our notarized documents we have been collecting to the state to be certified as Wisconsin has to put their seal of approval that all the notaries are legal and up to date. Then all those documents have to be sent to the Guatemalan Consulate office in Chicago for further authentication which can take up to 4 weeks. So as you can tell, its a long drawn out paperwork process still at this point.
When all papers are "official" we can then send that pack of papers which is called a dossier (doss-see-A) to our agency to send off to Guatemala.
In the meantime we will be awaiting our I171H from the Department of Homeland Security which gives us ultimate permission to adopt a child internationally. That can take up to 90 days to receive. Finally we wait for a referral of a child born in Guatemala and hopefully all goes well and we can bring her home when shes around 6-9 months old.

On another note, both boys are sick. Ryan is on antibiotics for an ear infection and bronchitis. Evan has a really bad GI bug and isnt able to keep down any food or fluids even. Hopefully they are both well soon!

First homestudy meeting

We met with the social worker from the homestudy agency last night at her office. We talked for 2 hours about our backgrounds and families growing up. Totally harmless and easy stuff. She comes on Feb. 24th to our house for another 2 hour visit.
In the meantime we are getting doc appointments rearranged as all 4 of us need updated physicals. We need lots of police clearance (local and state) and also FBI and we are working on sending those out but Jim needs to get fingerprinted first (I did mine last week).
I really hope to have all this paperwork done and set to the state for certification by the end of March.

First steps

First we have to go thru a homestudy to make sure we are a nice enough family to adopt a child. Our visits are scheduled on Feb. 13 at their office and Feb. 24th at home. There are many many other papers we need to complete. Doctors statements, FBI and local police clearance for example. The list goes on and on. Each paper needs to be notarized then sent on to the state for further certification. It will take about 2 months to complete this (we hope not more). The agency then takes all these papers (called a dossier) and sends them on to Guatemala where they then approve us as prospective adoptive parents. Then we wait for our referral which can take up to 3 months. On our agencies webpage there is a nice explanation of the whole process.
Why Guatemala? Many reasons actually. You get referrals of healthy newborns which are relinquished for adoption most often due to poverty. The babies are put into foster homes where they receive alot of love and individual attention. The mother is required to take a DNA test to prove that she is that babies mother and a photo is taken which we will receive. Our agency does many blood tests to assure the babies are as healthy as possible. We can visit our child as often as we want but only 1 trip is required for pick up which lasts about 5 days. Plus the children are beautiful. :)

Starting the journey!

We know that many of our family and friends will be surprised about our plans. But this is something we have talked on and off about for years and feel strongly that now is the time. We will be growing our family by international adoption. Ryan and Evan will be getting a baby sister from Guatemala. We signed with an agency January 20th and there is alot of paperwork to do. "She" probably wont even be born until the summer and we wont be able to bring her home until Christmas or January of 2008. Its a long road but decided to start this blog as a way to keep everyone up to date during our journey. I will post more about the process very soon.