Stahlke Adoption

Home Inspection

Wendy, our social worker, will visit tomorrow for her twice-yearly inspection of our home. Like many prospective adoptive parents in Illinois, we maintain a foster home license. It's not required if both Jonathan and I travel to Ukraine, but just in case one of us gets sick and can't go, we maintain the foster home license so that only one parent can still complete the adoption.

In her inspection, Wendy will measure the temperature of our water and make sure that all the smoke detectors work. She also checks for major safety issues affecting children, such as the boxes we FORMERLY stacked in the hallway upstairs. Starting January 1 of this year, foster homes are also required to have carbon monoxide detectors within 15 feet of every bedroom.

Wendy also chats with us about non-required subjects such as parenting techniques. In a previous job, she was a dorm "parent" at a home for delinquent teen-age boys, and at times supervised up to fifteen of them. She's an expert at discipline techniques, which benefits us. For example, when she visited us six months ago, we were just too busy to have the kids clean their rooms before her visit. After seeing the bedrooms in their true state, she had lots of advice about helping kids keep their stuff organized.

What she, and actually no one, is able to do for me is to manufacture more hours in the day. Oh, well, I guess twenty-four hours is what I get!

posted by Stahlkes @ 12:34 PM