Our home study has been canceled again. This time due to illness, so it cannot be helped I suppose.

My house has been cleaned from top to bottom twice in the past month. Scrubbed.

Oh well, now its getting so close to Christmas we’ll probably reschedule for January.

I was going to write about each element of the visit and what it was like for us. On this blog I'd share what kinds of questions were asked, and if she opened my underwear drawers, - but those details will have to wait now.

In the meantime, here is breakdown of a typical home study visit report. This includes every step of the licensing process and the visits. It is what our caseworker will write up and present to our agency:


* Our background checks – fingerprints and such.
* Our backgrounds
* Family life
* Relationships with family - past and present.
* Relationship with our spouse.
* Our parenting style and experience with parenting.
* Type of discipline style
* Employment history and hours that we work
* Religion
* Daily life – routines and such.
* Personal interview notes.
* Experience and feelings about adoption.

The caseworker/home study supervisor will write up all the above in a nice neat package and hopefully approve you for licensing and adoption!

Here’s what the The Child Welfare Information Gateway says about the home study interview:

Feelings about/readiness for adoption. There may be a section on specific adoption-related issues, including why the applicants want to adopt, feelings about infertility (if this is an issue), what kind of child they might best parent and why, and how they plan to talk to their children about adoption-related issues. If the agency practices openness, there may be information about how the applicants feel about birth families and how much openness with the birth family might work best. For more information, read Information Gateway's Openness in Adoption: A Fact Sheet for Families.

They have a great article on the whole process here.