Pre-Approval - Home Study Completion - Part 4

Finally!! We got Pre-Approval (PA)! We received PA on August 19th. This step is amazing because it means we are “matched” with our little guy and no other family can move forward with him. The Chinese government has recognized our intent to adopt him and has given us pre-approval to move forward with the adoption. Technically, this approval does not mean he’s “officially” ours; we still have to send in our dossier and meet all of the Chinese government’s criteria for adoption. The next steps include finishing our home study and collecting our documents for our dossier.

The home study process is interesting. You are required to turn in a lot of private and personal information about yourself. If you have something to hide, too bad, it will come out in the home study. The money you spent last week at the hair salon, guess what, it’s in your home study. Every penny that you have in the bank account, every cent that you spend, every bill that you pay, every piece of property that you own, it’s all in the home study. You are thoroughly examined before you are given approval and this is all before the very first home visit. Once the agency feels satisfied with knowing everything they possibly can know about you on paper, you get to move forward with home visits. In order to complete the home study, you are required to have four home visits with a social worker. These include one introductory meeting, an individual meeting with each adult member of the family, and a physical walk through of your home to examine that the environment is safe and acceptable for a child to live. In addition, if you have children at home already, they will be “interviewed” as well. The child interview is very playful and more just about asking them if they know about the adoption and how they feel about it, all done while playing toys and games. Very casual.

Our home study has been complicated. Our home study should have been completed by September 9th, but there was a change in administrators at our home study agency and as a result, our home study was delayed. Our fingerprints from the state had arrived at our home study agency, but our home study coordinator seemed to have missed it, which meant our Child Protective Services (CPS) background checks expired before the home study was completed. This expiration resulted in our having to resend and wait for the CPS background checks to be completed a second time. Resubmitting our background checks delayed our home study completion by four weeks. Four weeks is a really long time in the adoption waiting process. It was pretty frustrating.

Once our updated fingerprints came back, our home study was able to be finalized. It had to be written up by our social worker, approved by the home study agency, and then approved by our adoption agency. There were a few changes here and there that had to be made, but once all was said and done, the home study was finally approved! Just to give you an idea of how long this process took, we started our home study in May and we completed it in October. Ideally a home study should take approximately three months; ours, however, hit quite a few snags, resulting in a five-month timeline.

There are many good things that come with a completed home study. We are now eligible to apply for grants and no-interest loans, and we can now complete our dossier. The dossier is our next big step and will ultimately determine the rest of our timeline, including official travel times. Can’t wait to have that sent off to China!