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Our homestudy began on February 5th, 2004, a couple of days after Gwion’s first birthday. We meet our social worker, Barbara, for the first time. She is really nice. It’s the first time she’d ever done an ICA, so it was going to be a learning process for us all. We gave her as much information as we had about adopting from China, and the DFES (Department of Education and Skills) fact sheet about adopting from China. Our first visit was really going through what would happen, filling in our CRB request form (police checks), and going through what we already had on file, from when we had first started the original homestudy in July 2002. We had already done a family tree, which needed a couple of babies added onto it (Gwion and a couple of nieces and a nephew), and we already had written pieces about our childhood.
Gwion after his 1st Birthday
In total we had six visits from Barbara; four of them were with me and Rhodri, and we had one visit each on our own with Barbara, just really so that if either of us had any concerns, we could tell Barbara about them without offending the other partner. But neither of us had any problems. The homestudy covered a wide range of subjects about our working life, family life, childhood, extended family and friends, and any support we had. It also looked at how we are bringing Gwion up, our values at raising children, and how we were going to cope with adopting a Chinese baby, the racial problems and maintaining her culture, etc.
We stated that we want a baby under 12-months-old, and that it was important the she/he was at least 18- months younger than Gwion, who would be at least 2 ½-years-old by the time we got a referral (the waiting period when we started our HS had gone down from 14 months to 9 months). Also, we wanted a baby that had no known medical problems.
Our homestudy visits were completed by the end of April 2004, and then we had to wait for Barbara to write up the homestudy and we also had to get our medicals done (which we did on 29th June, both the one for the local authority and the one required for the CCAA), and then wait for Barbara to let us know our date for panel.
Gwion and Daddy in the Lake District, England, June 2004
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Many Thanks To
Special permission has been granted by Grace Lee, Cute Colors, to use the images for this page
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