Hello! Today I want to take a break of Kiko’s terrible two nightmare talk and talk about our adoption process. After our initial interview with ISSJ, we were notified that we got approved! Yay! Now we can move on to collecting necessary documents for the study. If you are new here, my husband and I are trying to adopt a child, and going through two different routes to increase our chances of receiving a child: we are trying both adoption and foster care. I’ve written our process for foster care registration here in the past.
When we received the letter from ISSJ informing us of the list of necessary documents, we glanced at it and put it back on Andy’s desk. The letter sat there for a bit – there is a long list of documents we have to get, starting from certified copies of birth certificates, marriage certificates, physical evaluations, personal statements, self biographies, pictures of our place and so on. Today we decided to tackle this long list and got a little over half done. We had to order Andy’s birth certificate from the U.S., since we live in Japan now. Andy started writing his biography, and has spent at least 3 hours on it already.
Although collecting all these documents is a lot of work, I think it is good that the agency requires a through information and background check of the hopeful parents. If I were a parent who was putting my child up for adoption, I would want the agency to be as through as possible. I forgot to write about our initial interview with the case workers at ISSJ, but it went well, and Andy and I wished that the child guidance center did the same thing for foster care registration. The ISSJ case workers asked many questions about our selves, our plans etc, many of the topics Andy and I had discussed at home. I think having an interview like that would help weed out some of the bad foster parents… I like ISSJ, I feel like they really make sure to place the priority on the children.
We are hoping to have all the documents sent to the agency by the end of this summer, so we can do the home study. I am excited. Another step forward toward adoption.
Photos are from my Instagram – Follow me @vivatveritas