Pre Home Study and Training

Pre Home Study paper work:

Well, we are in the pre-home study stage of our adoption process. This includes things such as drug-testing, finger printing, doctor visits, tax returns, and financial statements, among other things. Once we get this bunch of paperwork done, we can start our home study. The home study itself takes about 4 weeks. It is a series of 4 meetings, each at least 1 week apart. Three of the meetings will be at our home and one will be at the Bethany office. I don’t know the specific details of the home study yet, but it’s basically a way for our adoption agency to get to know us as a family and make sure we will be suitable parents for an adopted child.

Training:

Throughout this process we have to complete 30 hours of adoption training. A couple of weeks ago, we went to the Bethany office on Sycamore for an all-day Saturday training on “trans racial adoption.”  We watched the video/documentary “Adopted” (It’s NOT the Polly Shore version on Netflix). Go to www.adoptedthemovie.com for more information.  Travis and I and about 10 other couples completed the training. We had some great discussions on the movie and watched other videos related to adopting a child of a different race or ethnicity.

I would highly encourage you to watch the movie. It is from the perspective of 2 families. One from a child, now 32, adopted from Korea. The other is from the point of view of a couple recently adopting a little girl from China.  Whether you are adopting, someone in your family is, or know someone who has adopted, this movie is a great eye-opener to the perspective of the non-white child being adopted in to a white family and community.

I feel like we have already learned so much about international and interracial adoption, and yet we are only at the tip of the ice burg…how exciting!

Another “training” opportunity I am looking forward to is the Ethnic Hair meeting. Since there is about a 100% chance that our little girl will be of African (specifically Ugandan) decent, I need to make sure this mama is able to come through on the hair side of things. If we were adopting a little boy, he would most likely maintain Travis’s hair style (buzz cut). But since we are requesting a little girl, it’s time for me to learn how to do ethnic hair. Braids, corn rows, tight curls, froes.  This could be interesting...