The Home Study was conducted over a period of about five months and was comprised of an orientation, an adoption education session and four interviews. The first interview was conducted in our home with both of us present. The second and third were individual interviews at the Lutheran Ministries office a few miles from our house and the last another joint interview at the LMG offices. All were conducted by our Social Worker, Christine. None of the questions were unexpected and we felt quite comfortable throughout the interviews. Caroloyn did, however, do a major house cleaning before Christine's visit. She had visions of her walking through the house with a white glove, I suppose, making little black marks on a checklist every time she found something out of place or peppered with the slightest amount of dust.

The orientation was a two hour session with other prospective adoptive families. We had the chance to ask questions and talk to the other parents. The education day was wonderful. It was an all day meeting where we met and talked with families that have adopted children from the U.S. and from other countries. There were families that had just completed the adoption process and some families that had grown adopted children and everything in between - adopted children, biological children, multi-national families, you name it. In the afternoon we had the chance to talk to the children in the absence of their parents. It was a very candid session and overall a very, very informative day!

As part of the process we each had to write an autobiography. Writing is something I like to do, so it became a project for me while Carolyn dreaded it. It took us a couple weekends and some nights in between, but we knocked them out and had them to our Social Worker on time. It was like I was in school again and it seemed odd that I didn't get the paper back a few days later with red circles all over it with a disappointing grade on the front. Actually, I did get it back and was asked to shorten it a bit. I can get wordy on paper...

Once the Home Study was complete, we were almost to the point of having our dossier complete. Things were moving fast!

Here's a brief outline of what it contained:

The finished document was ten typed (er um, word processed) pages long.