BTDT I am afraid. We went through the home study from hell that is
for sure. My weight and my husbands were both scrutinized by the guy
doing the homestudy, who by the way was about 100 lbs overweight too!
I am 280 and dh at the time was 375. He has lost a few lbs since then
but not much. Our homestudy was for social services to do fostercare
and adopt through them if applicable but at the time the homestudy was
just for fostercare. We had the clown walk into our home the second
night for the interviews, tell us we were too fat, yup his words
exactly, to be parents and that we should bench our homestudy til we
both lost weight and then reconsider. I threw his carcus out of my
house, which actually he was lucky becuase I was being nice, I wanted
to drive him through the kitchen wall but it took all I had not to
trust me! The next am we marched into our DHHS office and saw our
liscensing worker we were working with and told her what was happening
and she was livid. They
contract out for the homestudies to this particular agency in
Gardiner Maine. She got the owner of the agency on the phone and
expressed our concerns and the fact that we did not want him back in
OUR home he was no longer welcome and we were requesting another
social worker. She denied our request so we went with a second best
plan, our liscensing worker was to be here for ALL future visits with
this jerk. And she was! Discussions on our sex life included and we
did not care at that point. You just get to a point where you have
had enough and don't care who knows what anymore. I have to say I had
fun with thim when we got to the sex stuff. He would ask if it was
satisfying and I would give him a nice lenghty reply about how it was,
where it was, best positions for "FAT" people etc etc. DH was a tad
embarrassed but at that point we figured we had nothing to lose. We
knew darn well they were both terrified we would sue the crap out of
them for his comments, which we di
d have grounds to in the state of Maine under the discrimination laws
and the fact that there are no written rules/laws/guidelin es regarding
weight in our state for fosterparents or adoptive parents. Trust me I
went law hopping the night I was fuming fire out my nostrils and
ears! We also figured at that point that we had been so
much "trouble" that we would never get a placement and basically be
black balled so we had nothing to lose so to speak. We did get
liscenced which we expected due to the above but never thought we
would get a call for a child. Six months later we actually did, a
newborn baby girl that was born drug addicted and going through
withdrawal of that and nicotine and needed a home. Mom had lost her
other three children already and they were taking this one at the
hospital, could I come get her in an hour! AN HOUR????? OK, so I
did. She and I went to get diapers and formula and two outfits on our
way home. I had picked up a carseat on my way there.
Mind you I knew NOTHING about being a parent let alone to a newborn
going through withdrawal. Did I forget to mention that this happend
on a FRIDAY of a holiday weekend???? YUP. What became the nursery was
my home office and was full of 6 yrs of stuff! OYE. Well that
weekend we maxed out the credit cards at Babies R Us and emptied out
that room, man was that a ton of work, all on zip for sleep as she was
up every hour either crying or hungry. Poor thing :( We were thrown
into parenthood by the seat of our pants and holy crap was it to be a
rough ride.

There is a ton more to this story but I will save the gory details for
anyone that wants them later. This should answer your question and
get you some places to start at least.

BTW, that little girl is now 2 1/2 yrs old and we will be finalizing
her adoption on February 7th at 1pm! Party will be that weekend to
follow :)

I will not say it has been easy, in fact we will never do it again, at
least not through our social services department that is for darn
sure. Our lives for her first 18 months were a living hell and I do
mean living hell, I thought infertility was bad, this made infertility
look like Disney Land! But again, that is another story for another
time.

Hugs
Karen