Updates

Monday evening we had a phone conference with our Social Worker to update our service plan. A service plan is something that our agency goes over with each prospective adoptive family to verbally discuss and write down a time line with dates in terms of meeting and completing particular goals.

We initially filled out this service plan in November and it lasts for 90 days. I can not believe that it has been 3 months already since we officially began the process with our agency. We had to do a new service plan since the 90 days was up. We had almost met most of our goals that we set to accomplish within 90 days. The only that we did not have completed was the homestudy. We only have one more visit and thats it.

So, this is where we are with the process:

• We have one more home study visit where our SW will come to our home
• We have to receive the 911 call records from the two counties that we have lived in since we moved here via mail to make sure that we did not have any 911 calls within our residence (takes 3 weeks or so to return)
• Drug tests for both of us
• Physical with my urinanalyis (my pcp's office forgot to run this when I had my physical in November so I have to have this done so they can send in paperwork to the agency)
• Family history background sheet for hubby and I (this is a form that is filled out where you give complexion, hair color, eye color, special characteristics and data of birth date, date of death and cause of death, grandparents, great grand parents and aunts and uncles)

The items that we have left are minor and not time consuming. We plan on having the final visit within the next couple of weeks. Our SW advised us that she would bring us copies of profile books so that we will have an idea of what to put in the book. We are trying to begin pulling the profile book together next week.

We asked our SW how many AA families are waiting for babies. She advised us that there is one parent that is waiting for the birth of the child and the other family is in the waiting process. So, therefore there is one more family waiting ahead of us. Actually, it would just the two of us waiting because the birth families have a choice because they are typically shown profiles of a couple of different families.

We have decided on nursery furniture items that we are going to order. We plan on ordering this coming weekend since it takes 8-10 weeks for most of the items to return. We are dealing with two different places for our furniture, but we are placing the order for the crib and a couple of other items on Saturday. I will feel much more comfortable knowing that we at least have the crib and some major pieces if something occurs quicker than expected. The bedding can always be purchased later. My initial fear was being caught out there with an empty nursery and having to settle for something that I really did not want because we did not have time to wait for an order.

However, we did find a really nice "emergency" set at BCF that stays in stock in the event that we didn't have anything with an early arrival. It was an expresso set that we found a little while back. This set was our back up plan if the baby came before the furniture that we really wanted to order returned.

We are going ahead and moving forward with ordering the crib that we decided on and we will have to wait for it to return.