Thursday, April 9, 2009

Complete and Utter Panic...


but it's a-ok now. For about 30 minutes this afternoon my heart was racing as I was trying to figure out what happened to our homestudy, what happened to our release and why our homestudy agency is so confused and why our adoption agency and homestudy agency are having some problems communicating. This is how it went down:
I'm at swimming lessons with Chloe when my cell phone rings. It's our homestudy agency. I pick up the phone--they have a problem. Our adoption agency has called them and want to know when they sent the draft copy of our homestudy for approval, because they don't have a copy of it on record. The lady on the phone then tells me she can't send them a copy because that's not our placing/adoption agency that they have on file--they have Great Wall. So, she refused to send them the homestudy. After talking to her for about 5 minutes, I am so confused. Why does our adoption agency need our homestudy draft, they have our dossier? And, why does our homestudy agency have no record of them as our placing agency? I hang up with her telling her I would call our adoption agency and get back to her in a little while.
So, I'm totally confused. I'm standing by a swimming pool trying to figure out--
a) why our adoption agency needs a draft of our homestudy when they have our completed dossiers with the approved homestudy in the dossier
b) why our homestudy agency thinks we are completing an Ethiopian adoption with Great Wall (our agency for our China adoptions and with whom they would never have had any communication yet b/c our dossiers for our China adoption was written by a social worker with Great Wall in 2006 when we still lived in Texas)
c) what the heck is going on?
So, I try not to panic and remain calm while I get Chloe showered and dressed. We make it home where I call our Ethiopian adoption agency to get the low-down on what they called our homestudy agency for exactly. It seems they have to report reviews of all homestudies for Hague compliance and they somehow didn't have the original email with our homestudy draft. They were calling to get it resent so they could have it on record. I then called our homestudy agency (here in NJ) to clear things up. They apparently had misfiled our paperwork and only had that we were waiting for our referral from China with Great Wall and would have to do a new homestudy for China. Apparently they realized they had misfiled something after they got off the phone with me, dug around and found all the correct documentation.
In the end it was much ado about nothing but it did send me into a complete panic until I could clear things up. Apparently, having clients who are in the process of two international adoptions at the same time is very confusing to our homestudy agency. Luckily, they figured it out and all is back on track--WHEW!

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