The home study went well last night. Melissa had told us it would take about an hour and a half, but it took less than an hour. She came over, we sat at the dining room table and she asked us a bunch of questions, mostly about our parents (not really sure why) - a lot of the information she already had in our application, I guess she just wanted to expound - I think they needed something to talk about in an "interview", so we sort of re-hashed a lot of what was on the application. I thought we'd talk more about actually doing foster care, but we didn't at all.
After the interview she took a tour of our house. We had this check list of things that we're supposed to have in our house, like smoke detectors on each floor, fire extinguishers, "household poisons" locked up, enough square footage in bedrooms, separate beds for each foster child, etc. At the end of the interview she went through the check list verbally, asking us if we had all these things done. We answered yes to everything. I mean, we'd spent the last few weeks making sure everything was done on the list, but I thought she was going to go through the house doing an inspection, making sure everything was how it was supposed to be, but she didn't.
After that we did a tour of the house, and basically she just looked in each room. I'm not sure what she was looking for, she didn't say much. I expected her to be looking in the cupboards and everything, but she didn't. So, it was much easier than I thought it would be.
At the very end we asked her how soon we could expect to start getting calls. She said they put out a new list each month to the social workers, so we'll be on the list going out in June. I assume it'll be towards the beginning of the month. So that's actually perfect, because we're going to MN the very end of May, and hopefully it won't take long to start getting calls! We're basically licensed for 2 foster children at a time. She asked how many we wanted. I told her 2 for now, mainly because of space, but also I don't want to overload myself. We can always change it later. The social workers will not only have our names, but also our preferences (age, gender, etc), so they won't likely call us with 15 year old boys unless they're totally desperate. In which case, we can still say no. We can always say no, we don't HAVE to accept every call.
We're all really excited. It's a relief to have the application complete. Now we just wait. We still have a few things we need to buy - mattresses for the bunk beds we just got, and probably a couple extra car seats.
Ok, funny story:
A couple weeks ago I was checking to make sure the smoke detectors all worked. I found out that the one in the living room didn't have a battery in it! Good to know. So I bought one of those little rectangle batteries (9v), plugged it in, and it still didn't work. So we bought a new smoke detector. Derrick went to pull the old one down, and saw that I had the battery in backwards. Yeah, I know. In my defense, we have really high ceilings, and the smoke detector is way up at the top of the wall. Even standing on a bar stool, I could barely reach to put the battery in, so I couldn't see very well what I was doing, I just kind of stuck it in there. Anyway, so he turned it around, and it worked. So that's good, we can return the one we bought.
Well, last night we realized WHY somebody took the battery out. It's right above our bedroom door, which is right next to the bathroom door. The STEAM from the shower set off the smoke detector last night, AFTER the kids were all in bed. And it didn't just go off for a minute, it kept going and going and going. We tried putting a wet cloth over it (that's what I used to do when I burned things in the kitchen), but that didn't work. Finally, Derrick got fed up and pulled the battery out. HA HA HA! the irony.
No comments:
Post a Comment