We have completed our first home study interview. The whole home study process is done over three visits. The first two are done downtown Minneapolis at the Adoption Minnesota office. The third and final visit will be done in our home. Our two office visits are done one week apart and the last closely follwing.

It has been a rather wet spring. While some rain is good, all the moisture has been a bit much and made springtime a mess both in spring sports and planting for my dad and other farmers in the area. This morning was no exception. Adam and I awoke around 6:30am to rain once again. With our appointment at 9:00am we wanted plenty of time to get ready, and eat breakfast, before commuting into downtown to find parking during morning rush hour.

We navigated the one-way streets dwarfed by numerous skyscrapers and eventually found a reasonably close underground parking ramp. After parking underground and walking through some underground tunnels we surfaced an elevator on ground level and found ourselves at the depot. We tried to walk indoors for as longs as possible and utilized awnings and zig-zagged through a hotel lobby to go out it’s backdoor to come right on 3rd avenue to avoid the rain as much as possible. There was quite a bit of construction so some sidewalks were closed. Our commute by foot involved walking under some scaffolding that was above detoured sidewalk.

The parking garage was below the depot so
we cut through to avoid getting wet.

We were kept relatively dry under the construction awning 

After arriving in Mill Place we hit the bathrooms to dry off our water speckled glasses and droplet beaded hair. We then made our way into the office where we were greeted by our social worker. Our social worker is simply delightful. She has over 10 year of experience in specifically working with adoptive families to prepare home studies. We immediately felt comfortable with her and it seemed like the two hours flew by.

The purpose of the home study is to educate and prepare us for adoption, as well as make sure we are a capable couple who can meet the needs of a child placed in our care. This first visit was a lot of educational information as well as going through our preferences to ensure they match and are within what we agreed with our agency. Our social worker did a lot of talking and shared a lot of helpful information.  We both left feeling confident and empowered and laughed at ourselves for being so worried about the whole thing. Our social worker did alert us that the next visit we would be doing most of the talking as she will get to know us better and ask us a lot more questions. At any rate we feel comfortable with our social worker and I think that makes things a lot easier on everyone. We will see what our next visit brings, and then the final visit within our home (that one i’m a bit more nervous for), but overall the home study doesn’t seem as bad as everyone makes it out to be.