Waiting

While January was the month of paperwork, February has been the month of waiting. We've completed all our parts of the adoption process and now we must put our hearts in the hands of others and wait for them to complete the next steps.  This is the most challenging part of the process as days turn into weeks and weeks into months and nothing is in our control.

On February 5th, I found out that our Home Study Report had been written and was now under review. YEAH! It had passed the first of 5 reviews. The next on the list was a review by Hopscotch, our placing agency. Unfortunately, the contact person at Hopscotch had been unresponsive to both my emails and our social worker Courtney's emails requesting to obtain the Guyana specific information needed for our Home Study Report. After I sent an email to Courtney and inadvertently copied Viviane at Hopscotch where I may have stated, "Please be sure to include Viviane on the email - she's been the only responsive contact there", we FINALLY got a response! Of course, now Courtney had to re-write parts of our Home Study Report so that it met Guyana's requirements which would set us back several days.

On February 12th, I checked in with our social worker Courtney to find out where our Home Study was in the review process. She said that Hopscotch wanted to review the document towards the end, so instead of sending it to Hopscotch, it was in review #2 for grammar by another person at Evolve.

On February 13th, our Home Study moved on to review #3 - our review! It's a 25 page document so it took a couple hours to read through it in between attending to the kids (for me) and work (for Shane). We found quite a few discrepancies with things like ages of family members or length of employment since Courtney had used our old Home Study that she had written for Kate's adoption and forgot to update some items. We sent her all the changes that afternoon and hoped for a quick turn around.

At the end of the day on Friday, February 15th, our changes would finally be made by our social worker and our Home Study sent off to Hopscotch for review #4. Unfortunately Monday was a holiday, so Hopscotch wouldn't be starting their review until February 19th. We had hoped that our Home Study would have been on it's way to USCIS by now. At the rate we were going, we'd be lucky if it made it to USCIS by the end of February.

On February 20th, I received an email from Hopscotch - they had finished their review but wanted to re-review it one more time after their changes had been made. While I was glad they were making sure all their i's were dotted and t's were crossed, it meant it would take even more time before we'd have an approved Home Study...and more time before we'd hold our little girl.

It took our social worker at Evolve an entire week to respond to Hopscotch with clarifying questions about their requested changes - 7 ENTIRE DAYS! On a side note, we had paid Evolve a large fee to "expedite" our Home Study so you can imagine our disappointment to find out that as of today (February 28th), the changes requested by Hopscotch had not yet been completed. We were crushed as we painfully watched the month of February slip away.

To top it off, this morning I received an email from Courtney our social worker that she'll be out of the office for several days next week and doesn't expect to have our study completed until mid-March - likely just in time for us to be out of the country on Spring Break.  We are beyond frustrated with how slow of a process this has become. Please pray that our social worker makes our Home Study a priority and that it is finalized quickly so that we can begin the next step in the long process to bring our daughter home.