Remember when I said that I had very little confidence that our home study was complete when it was sent to the state office for review? Well, guess what!
On Friday I e-mailed our contact C. at the state office. You may remember that she’s not one of the workers who reviews home studies. Rather, she works in recruiting adoptive parents. Anywho, I asked her if she’d had a chance to put our scrapbook back in the mail to us, as I had yet to receive it. No hurry of course, but I just wanted to make sure that it wasn’t now lost somewhere in the vast abyss of the USPS. (She has yet to mail it. Okay fine.)
I also asked her approximately how long it took to review/approve home studies once they reach the state office provided that they were complete. I’d asked that once before and got the “Well, it depends on who the study is assigned to and their case load and whether or not they’re out of town often” answer. But are we talking a month or three months or six months? I know every case is different but she has to have SOME general idea. (Her response to that question was the exact same as the first time so I still have no idea.)
She also happened to mention that when she was at the state offices last Friday, she found our home study IN HER MAILBOX. No idea why it was there, but if it was in her mailbox, it clearly wasn’t being reviewed by anyone.
But that’s okay. Know why???
Because the final thing she told me was that when she looked through our home study, it was nowhere near complete – that all of our foster/adopt class “stuff” was missing. (In the ten-week foster/adopt class, we generated what is easily a three-inch thick stack of paperwork – questionnaires, homework, forms, graphs – you name it. She has none of that.)
Know why?
Because our SW didn’t send any of it – said she’d never had to before.
Mmmmmkay.
But she’ll send it out today.
Mmmmmkay.
'Cause I’m certain that everything will get copied and sent this time.
So to review for those keeping score:
Our home study has been sitting at the state office, INCOMPLETE, for one month.
Mmmmmkay.
On a happier note, O and I had such a fun Saturday. My dad is a daylily expert and we went to see him speak at the Dogwood Festival in the town where my parents live. He had a great turnout – about thirty people – and it was so wonderful to hear him share this passion with others. Afterwards, my mom came up and we had lunch and we wandered around the town square people watching, shopping, and enjoying the perfect spring day and the beautiful old dogwoods.
Ahhhhh, springtime in the South. It’s a good thing.
P.S. C. just e-mailed our SW a complete list of all the paperwork the state needs to begin reviewing our home study. One of them is proof of Infant and Child First Aid. Excuse me? I was told that we just needed CPR. In fact, the CPR class we attended was also a First Aid class but we left because we didn't know we needed it. I swear, I have absolutely had it with incompetence at every turn. Must go now and try to locate infant and child first aid classes. Three e-mails and one call to our SW re: CPR classes never garnered a single response, so I guess we're in this on our own too.
