the homestudy....

has happened! It's done. It was so short, we barely made it to 3 and a half hours. I guess we're easy :-)

The past few days have been a rush of cleaning and form-filling and a little bit of panic that for some reason she would walk into our apartment and say, what, you want to bring a baby into this incredibly unsafe unchildproofed home? Are yall crazy? Not that our home is unsafe. It's not childproofed yet, but we're still a year out from having a baby. It's just that, because we have to get this stupid foster-parenting license, we thought maybe our home was going to be judged a little more harshly than it was. In fact, the home inspection portion was literally just a walk through, much like I would give one of you who had not been to my home before. As in, here is our bedroom and here is the living room. That kind of thing. The only thing she wanted to make sure of is that we have a working smoke detector. Which we do.

The bulk of the homestudy was just the 3 of us sitting at the table while she asked us questions. These questions had to do with us, our backgounds and families, our ideas on child-rearing and adoption and parenting adopted children. It was very laid back and, for the most part, there were no wrong answers. She is an adoptive parent, herself, and let us know that she was not exactly fond of the process when she went through it.

So now, she has to write the homestudy, which I think she said takes about a month, and then she has to send it to FRC and Gladney and us for any changes or corrections. Then she will finalize it.

So, that's that. It's a great relief to have it done. Now we can just get to work on our dossier.