Starting Home Study

jenjen930

It's weird, because I have been totally calm about this all along, until now.  Now I am freaking out!  In my head I know it'll be fine, but my nerves just aren't cooperating.

I scheduled our first meeting with the social worker for next Thursday.  They said it will be 2-3 hours long.  I have no idea what they will want from us, so it makes me nervous. 

Any tips or advice would be appreciated.  If you have been through this, what did you talk about in your first meeting?

slndr042305

Its totally normal to be anxious. I know I was. Our first meeting we met the social worker, talked about why we wanted to adopt and then she went through a stack of forms, papers we would need to complete for the home study, what they all were and meant. We also went over their process, the number of meetings we would have, classes we were required to take, costs and she let us ask questions. Good Luck!

crene84

I haven't done my home visits yet (scheduled for this Saturday and next Saturday) but I did ask my SW what to expect.  Every company/SW does it differently, but mine does a home tour in her first visit in case there is anything you need to change before they come back for the second visit (safety related).  They also talk to us together and individually, asking us about our childhoods, our marriage, our motivation for adoption, etc.  I'll probably post about it afterwards. 

IRR

We had already filled out most of our paperwork before we had our first meeting with the SW.  Funny thing is she came to our house and we went to her office.  Oops.  No one told us the first meeting was at our house, so I assumed it was at her office.  I guess it's the old expression, don't ASSuME.  Anyway we waited the 30 minutes for her to get back to the office and then we met for about 2.5 hours.  She went through our biographies, and asked questions about our relationship, families, why we were adopting, and then went through a bunch of the classes we needed to take.  She asked us hypothetical parenting questions and how we would handle.  We spoke about the different types of adoptions.  We already knew we were using a lawyer so she told us that was good because her agency hadn't had many placements recently.  She told us stories about some couples who didn't pass the background checks and how she had to handle telling the one person vs. the spouse who didn't know any of the past background.  (We hadn't gotten our background checks back yet).  We talked about visits after the child was placed and what to expect from that.  We thought it was much better than we ever expected and we really like our SW, which was a surprise to us that she wasn't what we envisioned.  GL.

Dr.Loretta

At our first meeting she gave us the mountain of paperwork we needed to fill out, and started asking get to know you questions, mostly things from our autobiography. DH is not very touchy feely, so he was pretty much monosyllabic until our SW asked him about his hobbies. Then he was on a roll and talked for a good half hour.

GL!

raecheleblue1

Yep, I was completely freaked out before our SW meeting.  Cleaned for 3 days, stressed too much I didn't sleep.  Don't do that.  Honestly, it was nothing to worry about. We just sat and talked for a few hours about our lives to date, us as a couple, how we resolve issues, why we are adopting, our family dynamics, how we would parent, etc.  Our SW was our age, so that helped make it feel like we were talking to a friend.  We ended up asking her a lot of "what can we expect" questions as well, this being our first adoption.  Good luck and congrats on this step in the home study process.  I felt like we had made great progress after that first meeti.