Thursday, December 22, 2011

Second Home Visit...Check

Our second and last home visit to be approved for adoption is done!  And we passed!  The next time our adoption specialist is in our house will be when our second child has come home with us and has been living with us for several weeks.  Our house no longer has to be a museum and we can go back to living life at home as normal.  Phew! 
We aren’t fully approved quite yet, however.  We still have to do individual interviews.  We have these interviews scheduled for January 10th and they will be at the agency office.  I am feeling like the hard part is behind us now and these individual interviews will not be too difficult.  Over my Christmas break I will be working on our profile book and our “Dear Birthparent” letter and then we should be home free.  A giant cloud of stress has been lifted!  Now I can move on to the stress of having 9 adults and 7 children over for dinner tomorrow night!  But, that is a nice, happy stress and I am so happy to be able to have this milestone in our adoption process to celebrate with great friends!

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Phew, DONE...with the first home visit

I have been cleaning for days.  Literally.  I started cleaning last Thursday and it is now Tuesday.  I cleaned and organized the basement, the garage, and deep cleaned every square inch of my house.  But, no matter how much I cleaned, I just seemed to find more that needed to be done.  I am pretty sure the garbage man was cursing us as he loaded our garbage in his truck for a good 5 minutes at least this morning.  So, why the big cleaning frenzy?  Well, it isn’t because I just watched a Hoarders marathon and resolved to get every last thing that I haven’t used in the last 15 minutes out of my house.  No, it was for the big home visit for our adoption.  Our adoption specialist comes to our house to make sure that it is a safe and stable environment for a child.  Does this mean that the house has to sparkle from top to bottom?  No, but I am pretty sure you would be just as cleaning crazy as I have been if you knew that someone was coming over to judge your house to deem you fit to get something you really wanted.
Our adoption specialist came over tonight, talked with us about some of the forms we filled out, and took a look at our house, the whole house including the basement, garage, and yard.  My husband was not super thrilled that I had shown concern last week during a phone conversation with our adoption specialist that our basement would be part of the home visit.  He thought she might think that we had dead bodies down there or maybe that we had a special kind of garden growing.  Thankfully, we have neither of those things in our basement so we passed that section of the home visit.  However, on our way up the stairs, I was trying to open our baby gate and it fell off.  Great, she is looking for safety in our home and our baby gate just fell off the wall.  Luckily she didn’t seem to dock us points for that, at least in any way we could tell.  At the end of the visit she told us that everything looks good so far…and that we could schedule our second home visit then if we wanted to.  Wait…what???  A second home visit?  She is coming back?  Oh yes, I will have to enter stage two of the cleaning marathon!  *Sigh* well, at least we passed this visit.  Hopefully we will pass the next one too.