I have mailed a lot of paperwork over the last two days to three different companies One is our placing agency, Gladney. Another is our homestudy agency, Maine Children's Home, and our dossier service. I send things to all these places fairly regularly, and it gets confusing in regards who requires what. I'm so afraid that one of these times I'm going to send the wrong paperwork to the wrong place!
MCH will receive the last bit of paperwork in the next few days and then we just have to wait until they are ready to start our homestudy. We are hoping it's soon! Our medical forms have held everything up for a few weeks, but it's finally done!
Honduras requires a psych eval for all prospective adoptive parents so we are scheduled to go in and have that done April 2nd. We also have to take the MMPI (The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), which is around 600 questions during the eval! I hope we pass! We will need to have another one in Honduras during our first trip. They really want to make sure we aren't crazy, I guess.
In honor of adopting a daughter from Latin America, we purchased a Latin American doll to represent her culture, a pink teddy bear because we are adopting a girl (well, this was all me), and we finally received our American and Honduran flags that we are going to frame and hang in the playroom.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Waiting, adoption costs...
We are in waiting mode right now (the first of many!). Waiting to find out when our homestudy will be started. Waiting to receive our fingerprint cards so we can get that done. Waiting to pick up our medical forms so those can be mailed to our agencies. Waiting until we are able to get together with our notary.
I was doing some looking around because I was wondering how Honduras adoption costs were in line with other countries. It is so that's good! It is amazing how much each country differs in their adoption costs! I found a table that lists some of the most popular countries:
http://www.adoptivefamilies.com/articles.php?aid=2161
We had researched all of those countries ourselves before deciding on Honduras, which is similar in cost to China. We expect some other expenses to pop up, but hopefully they aren't significant and turn our journey into a $50,000 process!
And just a little off topic: Our son 14 month old son Evan has learned to walk!! How crazy is that? I refer it to a "drunken sailor stagger" right now. Probably not a good parental thing to say but it's a pretty amusing walk right now!
I was doing some looking around because I was wondering how Honduras adoption costs were in line with other countries. It is so that's good! It is amazing how much each country differs in their adoption costs! I found a table that lists some of the most popular countries:
We had researched all of those countries ourselves before deciding on Honduras, which is similar in cost to China. We expect some other expenses to pop up, but hopefully they aren't significant and turn our journey into a $50,000 process!
And just a little off topic: Our son 14 month old son Evan has learned to walk!! How crazy is that? I refer it to a "drunken sailor stagger" right now. Probably not a good parental thing to say but it's a pretty amusing walk right now!
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Applications!!
Our formal adoption Gladney application has been submitted! So, that group of paperwork is done. They have a rule that a child being placed in a home must be at least 6 months younger than the youngest in the house. So, we will be matched with a girl that is 0-18 months at the time of referral. She will be older than that when she gets home. Now we are starting work on the application for Maine Children's Home (MCH). We need many of the same documents for them as we did for Gladney so at least we have most of that ready to go. The biggest part of MCH's is an autobiography. We each have to complete an 18 page questionnaire about ourselves, family, finances, our marriage, education among other things. Once this is done, we can begin the homestudy process with our caseworker. Another application we need to do is fingerprinting. We will need fill one out so we go to our local police station, get fingerprinted and then they get sent to the FBI. I believe it takes about a month to get the results.
We will be working with a woman who get our dossier ready, so she will get and format everything, send it to us to be signed and notarized and keep everything organized. Using this service should prevent errors and hopefully get this done with more quickly than if we had to do it ourselves, which would take 4-6 months! Once the dossier is done, it gets sent to Honduras, translated and reviewed by many different officials down there. This process will probably take at least 6 months, so we really want to get the dossier ready as quickly as possible.
We will be working with a woman who get our dossier ready, so she will get and format everything, send it to us to be signed and notarized and keep everything organized. Using this service should prevent errors and hopefully get this done with more quickly than if we had to do it ourselves, which would take 4-6 months! Once the dossier is done, it gets sent to Honduras, translated and reviewed by many different officials down there. This process will probably take at least 6 months, so we really want to get the dossier ready as quickly as possible.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Paper chasers!
The 'paper-chase' is on!! This means we are starting the process of gathering all the necessary paperwork (and there's A LOT of it). So, now we are officially in the thick of things!
We had our phone orientation with Gladney, and they emailed me the formal application yesterday. Oh. My.God!! The application itself is 9 pages, and then we need to submit two groups of paperwork. The first group consists of 22 pages of stuff, such as marriage and birth certificates, passport photocopies, financial information, child profile, risk agreements...just to name a few. and the second group includes many forms that will need to be filled out by other people and notarized. It's amazing the stuff we need JUST for the application! Once we are approved through the adoption agency, we will need to start our homestudy.
We also will need to compile our foreign dossier, which is a package of paperwork that will go to Honduras and be reviewed down there. I will describe this more in detail once we get to that point in the process.
We had our phone orientation with Gladney, and they emailed me the formal application yesterday. Oh. My.God!! The application itself is 9 pages, and then we need to submit two groups of paperwork. The first group consists of 22 pages of stuff, such as marriage and birth certificates, passport photocopies, financial information, child profile, risk agreements...just to name a few. and the second group includes many forms that will need to be filled out by other people and notarized. It's amazing the stuff we need JUST for the application! Once we are approved through the adoption agency, we will need to start our homestudy.
We also will need to compile our foreign dossier, which is a package of paperwork that will go to Honduras and be reviewed down there. I will describe this more in detail once we get to that point in the process.
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