Baby Steps

I finally got a call from the social worker on Monday evening while I was cooking dinner. She was calling to get our email address so that she could send of the rough draft of our homestudy. She had some blanks that still needed to be filled in and a few things that she found to be unclear. Apparently what she does it takes a bunch of the different paperwork we gave the agency, autobiographies, finance forms, etc and puts them all into one document.

She complimented us by saying "y'all are both writers" which made me sad to think the quality of work the poor lady most normally have to read. Then she went on to say that it needed to stay as redundant as it is with our names repeated over, and over, and over (you get the picture). She also said that if we did revise anything to keep in mind that it would be translated by someone that may not speak English which I took to mean "don't use such complex sentences and use such big words".

I also emailed one of the very kind women at the HS agency yesterday to let her know how much difficulty Frig has had trying to get his disposition or certified letter from Austin. She is in Austin so she gave me some guidance but sadly for privacy reason Frig has to be the one to get the document. She seemed genuine sympathetic and asked that I keep her up to date. I didn't want her to think we weren't even trying. And was happy for some help.

Finally, I decided to do some research into leave time for adoptions and found out that the Family Medical Leave act actually provides the same 12 weeks maximum for adopted children as it does for birth children. Since Frig and I both work for the district they will not give us both 12 weeks, but we can get 12 weeks combined. When we went to the International Adoption training they said the mom should be the sole care giver for the first 6 weeks minimum, he will be able to hold the baby but not provide any other needs (food, diapers, etc) so we know I have to take at least that much time off. We will have to decide how we want to split this up. It is pretty exciting.