The final frontier...

Originally written December 15, 2005

Today was our final meeting for the home study, and... we were approved. Which is code that our check cleared.

Seriously though, we had to give her a tour of our home so that we "offered a safe place for our child(ren) to live."

Michelle also walked us through the State of Illinois' DCFS compliance document for becoming foster parents -- which is 20 pages. It included comments like

• "We will provide our child a mattress that has springs and is level, clean and suitable for a child to sleep on."
• "We will provide our child three meals a day and will not be more than 14 hours a part."
• "We will not feed our child from our own food source unless it's FDA approved" -- which means we can't have our own livestock and feed them the meat on our own -- or eggs or whatever you please.
• "We can't offer a boarding house." Which means neither set of parents will be moving in with us.

Our caseworker was very good in saying that this was bureaucratic and we went through the 20 pages rather quickly. It's just amazing the types of things we had to agree to -- like the fact that we will not have two kids share the same room if they are of opposite sex under the age of 6. Additionally, our children could share the same bed if they are the same sex until they were age
2 -- or something like that. We had to agree that we would take them to the doctor for regular checkups, etc. Very obvious stuff, but yet it's just amazing stuff that we have to go through.

Although we agreed to these things, we didn't even have to sign the 20-pg document. It was all checkmarks and then the caseworker and her powers that be signed the document. Very strange.

So, where do we go from here? We are submitting our last request for fingerprints through Immigration / Dept. of Homeland Security tomorrow. It will cost us $685 to get an "invitation for prints." This is the "pre-approval" to bringing our daughter(s) home. Once we receive the "invitation
for prints" there will be a date on there that we have to get our final set of prints -- which, we'll probably have to go to Naperville to have this set done. Once those come back clear, we will be able to submit our dossier. The only other piece we are waiting on in order to submit our dossier is the final clearance from DCFS. Which is key for us to get. The problem with DCFS is that they are now moving offices -- which could be a huge delay in our process. We are hoping that we have "made the cut" before they started packing up. We'll see...

We will not meet with our caseworker until after the holidays -- probably the second week of January. At this time, we will go through our dossier to make sure that everything is correct and complete. Hopefully, we will then be able to submit our dossier to China. Then the waiting game begins...

NOTE: for those of you that are our references, the agency's secretary never sent out the forms. They should have gone out today or tomorrow. So you should expect them by sometime next week -- just in time for the holidays. Please make sure you get them filled out and returned as soon as possible.

Until January 2006, happy holidays.