Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Working on our homestudy

When I called to talk to our home study agency I was surprised to find out that the Hague Convention requires parenting classes, even for parents that have already successfully adopted, like in our case. Thankfully, we only need five hours versus the ten hours required for new families just starting out. I have even heard that some agencies require up to 25 hours. Yikes!

Anyways, we are using http://www.thinkingofadopting.com/ to complete our five hours of training. What is really cool is that, it is all online. After looking at other sites, I found this one to be the easiest, most accommodating, and most affordable.

A couple of other online course are:
http://www.adoptionlearningpartners.org/
http://www.adopteducation.com/
http://www.heartofthematterseminars.com/

We are almost done with the classes and need only one more certificate. This has not held up the paperwork stage of the homestudy, and I am happy to report that we are almost done with all of it as well. All we need to do is the employment verification, and medicals.

I am meeting with the office manager at our doctor's office in the morning to discuss with her exactly what we need them to do. Since they were more than happy to help us last time, I am hopeful that things will go well tomorrow and I will be in and out of there in no time.

The agency we are using to complete our adoption gave me the exact medical form needed for our dossier, and a sample of how it should be filled out. How much more simpler could it get?



4 comments:

Sarah said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tami said...

Sounds like things are moving along! We hadn't heard of the parenting class requirement. Our agency didn't have us take them. That's great that the classes are online. It makes it so much easier!

Annie said...

We were able to take some classes on line for our foster parent licensing. Honestly, the on-line classes were actually HELPFUL - far superior to the ones we attended. I'll check out some of the sites you mention; we used "fosterparentlearning"; the content was excellent for adoptive or foster parents....or bio-parents really.

Chris and Virginia said...

Hi Christine, we are on the same journey, just a few months ahead of you. We had issues with a slow USCIS so I wanted to mention that you can apply before the HS is done. This didn't help us because we didn't know that we could bug the adoption department to get things moving.

We'll be watching your journey.