Tuesday, November 21, 2006 ~ homestudy #2

Karen came to our house to complete the homestudy. Kramer was VERY excited to see her, so we had to lock her in the carrier. We did a little tour of our house. It didn't take very long. We had to laugh after we read the homestudy. She said that our home was well kept and decorated nicely. Decorated? My house? I don't think so. It's a rental. The walls are made of plaster. I'm not sticking one thing in those walls. Unless she was counting the pictures of my really good looking nieces and nephews. That must have been what she was talking about.

Anyway, we found out something very interesting. Our DCI fingerprints had come back clean. So we talked about the FBI fingerprints. She happened to say something about minor consumptions. Oops. What was that? Oh that's right...Rob had one almost seventeen years ago when he was eighteen years old. Well, at least one of us didn't drink before we turned 21! :) So now, we have a major problem on our hands. The Colombian officials basically consider Rob a criminal and won't let us adopt! This seems crazy to me for more than one reason. First of all, an eighteen year old in Colombia is probably legal to drink. And second of all, since it happened in Brown County, he was fingerprinted. There are many counties today that STILL don't fingerprint. But since he was fingerprinted, it will show up on his FBI report. Another thing that seems odd is that to work in the school, Rob had to be fingerprinted by the DCI and also the FBI. They both came back clean. But I guess there are three levels of FBI fingerprinting. The school level is the one with the most slack. The adoption level is the one where they dig deep. Karen recommended that we talk to the State's Attorney from Brown County and have it expunged from Rob's record. However, the current one is not the one who served when Rob got arrested. He really didn't know what to do. I emailed the governor and I got a letter back from him on December 12 stating that we would need to go through the board of pardons and paroles. Great. So we decided to talk to the social worker from LAN. I'll talk about that later. In the meantime, we have completed our autobiographies, Rob's physical and TB test, and paid more money to LAN. Always more money. But in the end, it will be worth it.