HomeStudy ? - February 1st

    SKYPE is an amazing tool, I hardly if ever use it but none the less it is fantastic, it is the Jetson's in our lifetime where Spacely calls George at home to not only talk to him but to see him as well.

The adoption process has many meetings associated with it, the most robust and important of these is the homestudy. This is essentially a study of you, you as potential parents and how you live/interact at home. It is also a study of your home, is it a suitable place to raise children, is it safe etc... Doing our original homestudy was interesting as we were housesitting at the time, so we would never 'live' there again, yet the homestudy was able to take place there. At this juncture we were facing a homestudy update which traditionally takes place in the home. Rebecca and I have always been told we are outside of the box and the adoption agency has looked at our situation as one which stretching the boundaries and existing outside the box labelled staightforward.
     I don't remember when we hatched the idea of our homestudy being done via SKYPE but wow! did it make sense especially for logistical reasons. Friday the 1st of Feb was when we spoke with our adoption specialist, after the usual greetings and short updates on life we floated our idea. The rest of the conversation took a turn as most of the planned questions of meeting dates, locations etc... would be rendered pointless if we never left Britain to update our file in Indiana.

     We were told by our advisor that she needed to talk with her managers and see what the ruling would be. To not make the trip back to Indiana would save us much money and since we hadn't planned the trip we also did not have a place to stay, a car to drive or our ducks in a row from a church organizational perspective. As with other aspects of this winding road known as the adoption process we would have to carry on waiting, this time for a response to our unique query.
     Fast-forward about a week or so and I heard Rebecca race up the stairs, this either means extremely good or extremely bad news. On this occasion her beaming radiance indicated that the news she was delivering was positive and indeed it was! The email gave clearance for the SKYPE call, and to our simply posting the required documents for our update, not a difficult trip back to Goshen.