[beatrix]

I am just starting to fill out those questionnaires: Do I love my parents? Am I healthy? Do I eat enough fiber? What's my shoe size??

Haven't gotten to the actual home study but am getting there. What's the hardest part of the home studies you have been through?

PS Thanks to all who have answered my questions before. We have chosen an agency and are jumping into the pool!

[Nevada Jen]

Filling out those annoy questionnaires. No getting your husband to fill out the annoying questionaire. Eventually we just started writing stuff down (our questionaire was 12 pages of questions!). Here is an example.

Describe your religious upbringing:

My Answer: I am genetically a preachers kid who was raised by non religious mother. We went to church but it was for social status. It was where a large number of my mother's clients came from. Our church rarely mentioned God or did charity work. But we had great ski trips and christmas pagents. This really bothered me. I thought having a realtionship with God was important. Luckily I was able to get that through my father who was a children's minister. We spent 6 hours at church on the sundays we were with him.. . (about 10 more sentences here).

DH's Answer: Fine

The trick is to put something on the paper that is responsive to the question. It does not need to be the whole truth or all your thoughts, just an answer!

Good luck.

Jen

[mckenna]

for me the hardest part was waiting, but i am not a very patient person. i filled out all the paper work, scheduled my visits, and made a portfollio, rather quickly and during that time, kept myself busy. but once that was all done and i was waiting for the sw to do her part so that i could officially be "in the books" was the hardest part for me, cuz i lost the control at that point.

[bjolly]

hardest part for us was getting our pets licensed. we had licenses for the dogs but had to also get them for all 5 of our cats. Then we had to apply to the Health Dept for a Multi Pet license (our city requires this for anyone with more than 2 total cats/dogs, but no one ever does it). This involved going to the city shelter, paying a fee, having someone come to the home and take pictures of each and every pet along with the places where each pet sleeps. THEN we had to put a sign on the front of our house stating our intention to house 2 dogs and 5 cats (which of course had already been with us for years!). The sign had to be 3 foot by 4 foot with black letters of a certain size and had to stay up for 10 days. The only place on the front of our house big enough to display the sign was made of brick. Have you ever tried to stick posterboard to brick and get it to stay up for 10 days?

We finally received our Multi Pet license which we are supposed to keep prominently displayed on our wall at all times. We kinda felt it lacked something as living room decor though, so we stuck it in a desk drawer.

[echaos]

Originally Posted by bjolly

having someone come to the home and take pictures of each and every pet along with the places where each pet sleeps.

As a fellow owner of 5 cats I gotta ask... did they just video tape your entire house for the pictures of where the cats sleep??

Our cats sleep where there is sun, where there are blankets, on knapsacks left on the floor, on the table, on chairs, on the top of the fridge, in the bathroom sink, on the computer, on the dryer, behind the dryer, in the laundry (clean or dirty), on visitors shoes, on our laps, in the stroller, in any box left unattended, in the cupboards, on the ironing board etc.......

[LisaCA]

lol, the cats have about 10 official cat beds, and about 30 unofficial beds, including dd's car seat and our bed.

the hardest part...hmmm...there were several. dh wouldn't fill his paperwork out, took forever. he'd rather have root canal on all teeth apparently. had to force him nearly at gun point. next time I'm filling it out for him, lol. I also found it hard to not over think the questions. like, for instance "what's your favorite recent movie?"-ugh. at the time it was "bad santa" awesome movie, not so great for getting folks to trust you with their child . so we went for our next fav, Finding Nemo, much more appropriate. we finally decided to go with our first gut reaction in the other answers, lol.

[joskimo]

I have to 2nd everyone else, gettin gdh to fill it out and then reading what he'd write! The anxiety over waiting, the anxiety over the visit, too much anxiety.

[mommamarci]

I wanted to repsond that I hope the paper work is the hardest part because we just finished that!! It was hard getting my dh to do it, but I would ask him if he really wanted to adopt a child, and he would get busy! He did not want them to think he was not involved. Okay, so maybe I manipulated his emotions just a little...
-Marci

[Becky01089]

The hardest part for us is our wonderful sw who keeps losing our certified documents!!! She called today and said she needed my dh's certified copy of his divorce decree. I picked up that phone and left her a crystal clear message that I personally brought that document to the agency in the fall. I even knew what the envelope looked like. She better find it. The paperwork is enough to kill you.

[Vogi2002]

Okay I just had to laugh about the differences between dh's and my answers. His were all to the point, and short, mine were all explained and long. The hardest part was talking about sexuality in the marriage. Ugh. What do you say to that??

An example of my answer to a questions:

Describe an example of a disagreement regarding religion and how it was solved:

Mine: There are times we get into discussions about religion and talk about different views. Although we mostly agree on this subject, one thing we have a hard time agreeing about is the subject of the death penalty. In the end, we respect the other's view and realize that are differences just make us stronger individuals.

Dh's: None

Okay so i made him redo that one, but OMG!! I had to reread his because many answers were one word. He thought they were fine, but i knew they wanted more than that. Oh, and I pratically had to give him an award for doing "two pages a night". I did mine in 3 days, it took him 2 weeks. And i did most of his basic questions (name, birthday, family, ages, etc).

the hardest part is getting through it and thinking of things to say without braggin or sounding bad!!

Okay, HTH!!

Natalie

[Nevada Jen]

Natalie,

We did the two pages a night thing too. After about a week I finally just sat him on the couch and said. Here is the question what do you think. He would give me a one or two word answer and then I would turn it into a paragraph.

I called the other day to see what we had to do to keep our homestudy current and my agency said you need a new homestudy for every kid. I have to say, I decided that meant we were done.

Jen

[Casey677]

OMG, Bjolly!!! I have 4 pets and I am on cloud nine right now that we did not have to deal with that.

Getting my husband to answer the questions was such a pain in the butt. Seriously, I hid the remote control and refused to give it back to him until he finished.... the stinker bought a new one, UGH. But he did eventually finish it.

Jen, I am also currently thankful that we just need to do an update for a future adoption.. Whew!

[bjolly]

Andy - the guy asked where the cats slept and I just kind of looked at him and said "wherever they want." I mean, has he ever known a cat? I should have make him take a picture of the top of my head and my right ankle, since those are the chosen sleeping spots for two of them!

Did I mention the sign invited all who saw it to contact the licensing people with objections to our pets? Thank god none of our neighbors hate us.

Casey, LOVE the thing about taking away the remote.

[LisaCA]

our facilitator called us to say "hurry up!", that's how bad it was. Poor dh. when I finally turned it in I explained that dh had "issues" filling out the forms, etc. she laughed and said it's a problem with most guys. What gives? I know for dh who is an engineer, writing is hard. equations, now that's a piece of cake. string together a sentence? not so quickly done, lol. add to that the "thinking" part, and he was totally stumped. When I finally forced him to talk about it, he said it was "hard" . Turns out he evaluated his life and decided he was a failure . So I had to go thru and list his achievements to him so he could see what he's done in his life. yeah, I'm really looking forward to adoption process number two .

so if a guy could explain this to me it would help.

oh and I'm still trying to get dh to help me fill out our will and trust. I guess he thinks if he thinks about death it will happen, so if he doesn't , we're fine .

[Nicmic]

Did anyone run into issues with prior drug use? I didn't know if there was a standard time frame of how "prior" it has to be.