It is such a scary concept, the thought of someone sorting through your life to figure out whether you’re fit to be a parent. It may be called a “home” study, but it’s honestly a study of you and your partner as people. There is so much that goes into this, and so I have decided to cover it in two parts. The intention of this is to give a better understanding of what goes into a home study, something that I struggled to get a clear idea of before going into it. All I really found were checklists and horror stories, so I hope this helps bring you insight.

We decided to go through a private agency called A Family For Every Child (AFFEC) because they do out-of-state adoptions. We didn’t want to limit ourselves to kids just in our state, knowing there are many children needing homes in other states as well. I’ll get into how overwhelming this can be when I discuss the matching stage. If it’s something that you’re interested in, you can message me, and I’ll share more details on pricing. It’s not as expensive as people think, plus you have a more personalized experience. We met our adoption worker at a local coffee shop. She walked us through all of the paperwork that we needed to sign and things we needed to get done. Included in this was a personal essay about our life with guided questions. Wow, it was personal. It’s about your life, family, and personal philosophies. I’m fairly straightforward with personal essays, while my partner elaborates on things a bit more. What does that look like translated into pages? I wrote six, and she wrote twenty-one. Needless to say, after reviewing our essays, our worker had a few more questions for me than she did my partner. Fortunately, we learned about AFFEC from some new friends we met in the foundations class, and they told us about the essay. So we got a bit of a head start, and apparently, twenty pages is a pretty average amount.

While we were finishing up our essays, we also had to get our background checks done. Part of that process is getting fingerprints registered. Being that I have a childlike enthusiasm for random government activities, I was stoked. I was the kid who constantly played with the fingerprint pad at the bank and colored my thumb with lead so I could decorate the mile of tape I ripped from the spool. When everything came back clear, and our essays were done, it was time to schedule the home visit…