For those of you who have adopted more than once...

lafayettegirl

DS is 4 months old, so we are NOT quite ready to start the process again. But we will want to at some point in the future.

My question is about your home study. Does the addition of a child mean you have to do a completely new home study or can you just update your old one? Ours expires in January 2014, and we are trying to figure out if the adoption of a child will force a whole new home study, thus we just let our current one expire.

I don't want to spend a whole new $1500 for a new home study if we don't have to...

How did you handle this?

AwBeth

I'm not sure how it works for everyone, but our social worker told us if we had a baby (or moved or our financial situation changed), we'd have to update our home study.  So that makes me think it would just be an update for you?  I'm not sure.  

MagickalNarwhal

We had have a whole new one but we started the process more than a year after our first one.

Our agency has a template for those adopting again and it's a little different. The questions take into account the change of having a new kid and focused mostly on how we handled that. It was still a lot of work; we had to get new physicals and updated financial statement, we needed new letters of reference etc. Our SW said it stil took her a lot of time but not as much as the first time.

summergirl79

As others have said it depends on the state, we are looking into this right now and in our state home studies are good for three years and can just be updated to adopt again in our state- if we work with our national agency again they said any home study over 2 years needs to be completely redone.

orangecupcake

Ours had expired by almost a year when we started out for #2. We only had to do an update. But we went through the same agency. They told us we only had to do the update because they are the ones that did the original.

MagickalNarwhal

I was thinking about this more last night and I recalled that our agency doesn't let you start the process again until your youngest child is 1, so there wouldn't be a way to use an unexpired home study, logistically speaking.