We knew we were signing up for a wait. Judy, the Kansas City Holt director, said that 2 years is typical for waiting on a child from Thailand. So now the real fun (and scrutiny) begins!!
We really walked into our home study and all other rigors of this process with confidence. We are GOOD parents! Our boys are super, we love them, they love us, and what's to question? We are going to fly through these questions and examinations. Well, Barbara came to our home for the home study, and with an upturned nose and general frown, looked us and our house over, and asked us to prove ourselves worthy and innocent, because we were guilty and unworthy until we did! (Not really. Just really felt that way) It turned out ok, but we were not prepared for that! We understood Barbara was there to do her job, and probably has seen people try to adopt with wrong motives. Disarming any charm is probably wise in a social worker's job.
We did pass our home study, and went through several rounds of fingerprints and background checks. We collected the mounds of paperwork needed for our dossier. I think there were 22 documents needed for our dossier. We finally got our dossier all together in May, 2011. I had to take it to the secretary of state's office downtown to be signed and reviewed before we sent it to Washington DC. The documents needed to be in a certain order, all stapled together, and NOT tampered with or else our government would reject the whole thing! So when I presented it to the secretary of state's office, a young lady employee, ripped all my documents apart from the staple, scattered them all over the desk, told me I had missing documents, wrong documents, and threw them down in front of me! I remember starting to shake, temperature rise, and I tried to hold my shaky voice down. I tried to explain that they WERE right, and please don't mess them up!! David eventually took over because I had a break down right in front of everyone in the office! I went into the hallway and cried.
Turns out that we did actually had it all in order, and another friendly woman in the office helped out, re-stapled our documents, and calmed me down. I left the office seething, but thankfully got it all back correctly from Washington DC, bound correctly, and signed by Hillory Clinton herself:) We sent it to Holt the next day, and celebrated our accomplishments! Now we hurry up and wait...
