we had our homestudy home visit tonight!  This is the part of the process that everyone thinks of when you say you have to do a “homestudy” in order to adopt. In popular myth, this is where she comes to our house with white gloves to make sure that we’ve made the house spotless and if our home doesn’t pass her inspection then we don’t get approved for a baby.

In fact, we tidied the house up, but it was by no means CLEAN (last week was a heckuva week for both of us) but I resigned myself to feeling good about showing her that our house is “lived in.”  And then I thought about baking banana bread or cookies or something, but I ran out of time, so I just put together a tray with tea and mugs …. and then I ended up being the only one to drink the tea because J doesn’t drink tea and our social worker said something about not being able to do two things at once, so maybe it was best that I didn’t make munchies too.

but what actually happened during our home visit was that she arrived and sat down with us, made sure we had all of our paperwork in order, then read a list of things that we had to agree to (we’re aware that children are not perfect, we’re willing to create a “life book” to share our child’s story with them, etc., etc…..) and amiably chatted with us about our lives (not even sure if that was officially part of the visit, or just her being interested in who we are).  Then, we gave her a quick tour of the house (she loved it) and said she’d e-mail us any other questions as she came across them, and that she’ll probably have the report written by the end of next week.  that’s it!

So now we can focus on finishing the last few details on our profile/resume/thing they show to birthmothers to tell a little bit about ourselves, and as soon as the report’s written, we mail the whole thing off to Texas and then, I THINK… we’ll be in the pool.  wow.

these wonderful flowers were a very thoughtful and timely gift from one of my favorite five-year-olds (and his mom) who delivered them to me a few hours before the homestudy.  They came as one big bouquet, but you know I can never leave anything alone, and I ended up splitting the flowers into three “arrangements” to decorate the entire main floor of our house.  I had really hoped to have fresh flowers for our home visit, but hadn’t had time to get them–what a perfect gift.  Thank you!

oh, and yes, this means that we both finally finished our autobiographies and our physicals and pretty much most of the pre-matching paperwork.  Maybe this post should be more accurately titled “THREE big hurdles, cleared!”  woo hoooooooo!