Homestudy Rough Draft!

We just returned from our yearly Cousin Camp trip (i.e. family reunion), and found an email from our social worker Nancy waiting in my inbox. She sent us the rough draft of our homestudy to appove! Both Chris and I read it thoroughly and made a few minor suggestions. I just emailed the revision back to her, and the next step will be for ASIA to ok it as well. Then we will be able to send off the final draft to ASIA and officially get on their waiting list! Huzzah! I'd been hoping to get on the list before August, and it looks like that will be very doable :)

Final visit over!

Our final homestudy visit was this morning, and it went great! Nancy showed up right on time, and we did just a brief walk-through of our house (she didn't look in any closets or open any cupboards or anything). She didn't go into the backyard (viewed it out the windows), so she didn't actually interact with Ginkgo - she just SAW her, so that worked well :) Fortunately it was a nice cool morning so we just opened the windows, ran the attic fan for awhile, and then turned on some fans for while Nancy was here (in case you don't know, our central AC is broken). The topic of AC never came up, so we just didn't mention it and it didn't appear to be an issue. We then sat down in the living room and had a nice Q&A session for a couple hours, then she said she'd hopefully have the rough draft to us sometime next week! Once we approve it she'll send it to ASIA to approve, then she'll send us the final copies. I am definitely hoping we can get everything done this month, and it sure sounds like that'll be a possibility. Once ASIA receives the final draft, we'll get put on the waiting list. Now we just have to hope the waiting list will exist....(still waiting to hear news about Chung Yi and whatever changes they have made to their policies). At any rate, we're relieved that our portion of the homestudy is over! We may go out to eat tonight to celebrate. Probably somewhere Asian...

Big day tomorrow

So tomorrow morning at 8:30am, our social worker will be coming to our house for our final homestudy visit! The place is pretty clean, so I think we'll be good there. Ginkgo did pretty well with our recent house guests, so I'm hoping she won't be too hyper when she meets Nancy. We're hoping that she will be able to write up our homestudy report pretty quickly after our meeting - we're still rushing to get on ASIA's waiting list, even if we don't have any idea what is happening with Chung Yi's new rules/regulations yet. We just figure we have to keep pushing forward like normal and just hope everything works out OK.....Wish us luck! :)

Third meeting with Social Worker!

So today we had our third meeting with our social worker. It was actually pretty fun - we spent a lot of time looking at and talking about kids books that focus on adoption. This was our last visit at Nancy's house -the next (and final!) visit will be in our house. We are a bit nervous (and are cleaning every chance we get!) but Nancy has made us feel very comfortable, so I'm not too anxious.
I am anxious, however, about the overall status of healthy infant Taiwan adoption from Chung Yi (and other orphanages, too, I suppose). Rumors are flying that Taiwan will no longer send healthy infants to the US - that they are either keeping them for domestic adoption or they are sending them all to Sweden. It would seem that someone from ASIA is actually going to Taiwan this week to find out what is going on (hopefully). So we are crossing our fingers that everything will work out all right. We are researching other options, but we are really hoping everything will work out with ASIA and Chung Yi (for many reasons, one of which being the money we have already paid them and which we would likely lose forever if we had to walk away to apply elsewhere). So cross your fingers for us...and let me know if anyone hears more info on the subject! Thanks!

2nd Meeting/Blog additions

We had our second meeting with Nancy today, and I feel it went really well. This time there was a lot more Q&A, which was actually quite nice. I really felt like we had some good conversations. Only two more meetings to go! I'm nervous about the in-home meeting, but I don't feel TOO bad about it. We'll get our house nice and clean before then :)
I added a few features to this blog - just to jazz it up a bit. I've added a clock showing Taipei time (just because I think its neat) and a break-down of our timeline. I know I always love looking at other people's timelines, so I thought I'd get ours started - someone may appreciate it someday!
Tomorrow is my 27th birthday, so I get the day off work! I'm just going to bum around and go collect all the free birthday food I've been signing up for all year long. Probably have to do a bit of homework, too, unfortunately (I'm working on my Master of Liberal Arts degree). Mostly a fun day, though.

Meeting results

So I think our first meeting went really well! We went to Nancy's house (nice place, not far from my work) and she gave me iced tea, and she did most of the talking! She gave us tons of hand-outs (articles, lists of adoption resources, etc), talked to us a lot about various adoption issues, etc. Chris and I actually did very little talking! She made us feel very comfortable, I'd say. It lasted a little over 2 hours, and we are going back next Tuesday for our second visit. Then our third visit will be on Monday the 30th, and our final visit (in OUR house) will be on Wednesday July 9th! We told Nancy we are hoping to finish as soon as possible, and she said she'd go ahead and start writing up her portion so it will be done not long after our final visit. So it looks like we're doing pretty well time-wise. We are just so anxious to finally get on the waiting list and be able to kick back and relax for awhile....

First meeting with Nancy

So tomorrow we have our first face-to-face meeting with our social worker, Nancy. I've really been looking forward to this day, because I feel like we've really gotten something underway now! We are hoping that we may get two meetings in next week, in which case our final meeting (in our house!) would be done before the 4th of July. It would be nice to have it out of the way before the holiday, we have relatives staying with us, etc. Plus we are anxious to get on the waiting list. We just got the username/password combo to log-in to the "ASIA families only" section of the ASIA website, which is neat. They let you really follow how many families are logged in to the waiting list, when people get referrals, etc. It is nice to see, but frustrating because we feel the wait will be very very long for us. We are anxious to get on the waiting list, because I know there are other families pushing to finish homestudies, too, and the sooner we get on the better. So wish us luck...I'm not really worried about the meeting going poorly or anything, but it's just an important meeting so I want it to go well!