Last Homestudy Meeting

We had our last (we think) home study meeting today with our social worker. We gave her all of the forms and documentation that we have filled out and collected over the past couple months. She was pretty impressed with how fast we have gotten everything together, most people take much longer I guess. We still have a couple forms we are waiting on that we will hopefully get in within the next week or so. Once everything is turned in our social worker will give us our home study document and then we can apply to the US Immigration Service to get permission to bring our daughter into the country. We also got a call yesterday that our baby furniture is in and will be delivered on November 5th.

Big 30

We reached an important milestone in the adoption process today. Jen turned 30, this is important because China requires that we are both at least 30 in order to adopt. Our agency allowed us to start the process before Jen's 30th birthday but we would not be able to send our info to China until her birthday. We are still waiting on a few more documents to come back once we get them we can schedule our final homestudy appointment.

Closing a door

We had our follow up meeting today with our doctor from the Fertility Center. This meeting was just to discuss the results of our last failed IVF. We were a little nervous going into the meeting knowing that we would be telling the doctor we would not be continuing with fertility treatments for a while. He took the news really well, congratulated us and seemed genuinely excited for us. He told us a story of a conference he went to where there was a plane full of couples coming back from China with their little girls, and they were all so cute. He is surprised though that IVF hasn't worked for us yet. The next steps, if we decide to continue with treatments in the future, would be chromosomal testing on the embryos to test for abnormalities. They would perform a normal IVF cycle but do a biopsy on the embryos before transfer and only transfer the best ones. We had a good feeling coming out of the meeting knowing that we were closing out that chapter and moving forward with the adoption. We know that it is something that we can go back to and maybe the technology will be better when/if we are ready to try again.

Jen's Home Study Meeting

Today Jen had her individual home study appointment at Panera. It also went really well. I spent about an hour and 40 minutes talking with the social worker. We had a lot to discuss since my family is so big, there were many topics to cover. She thinks I am a very fortunate person to have such a loving and wonderful family and I agree. We talked about the same issues she covered with Steve and it was tough to come up with areas of disagreements, usually they include shoes, football or cats!! Next steps are getting the last few documents signed and sent in and then wait for the homestudy document to be compiled.

Steve's Home Study Meeting

Steve had his individual home study appointment today, it went really well. We met at the Panera Bakery in North Andover. She basically took the autobiography that I wrote and used it as a guide to discuss aspects of my life; childhood, school years, college, career and the relationship between Jen and I. She wanted to know how Jen and I resolve conflicts, that was an easy one because we don't have any, just kidding. We discussed the death of my father and the death of a friend of mine. Also discussed some happier things like why I think I will be a good parent and some of the things I like to do as an individual. The meeting lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes. After the home study I had to go across the street to my doctor for an appointment to get a physical to prove that I am healthy enough to parent a child. The physical was pretty basic but I have to get some blood work done to make sure I don't have HIV and about 17 other diseases, I guess this is a requirement from China.

Notary Public Fun

Who would have though that finding a notary public would be the most difficult task for us thus far? Jen spent this week making phone calls to notary publics trying to find one to sign a couple of documents for us. We finally realized that our bank has a notary on premises and she was able to take care of it for us tonight. These documents were additional background checks and some legal documents for CAWLI. We are pretty much done with the bulk of the paperwork for now. We need to get our physical/health forms completed, which should be complete within a week or two.