Round 1: Check

We had our first part of our home study bright and early on Sunday morning. It went very well and our worker basically asked us questions to get to know us better. Not hard really and it went a lot off of the auto biography we had already written.

(As an aside...remember when I spoke about being very wordy when I write? Yeah, totally the case with this autobiography. Our worker said that typically these first initial visits are lengthy because she has to ask a lot of questions to go further into the family's life. In my case, she said, she wouldn't need to ask a lot of questions because my autobiography was so in depth. I had a good chuckle at that!)

Then she took a tour of the house, including the newly painted upstairs (Yay!), and learned that our basement is "not livable space." Tee hee hee, ya think?!? Really, it's just a cellar. I mean I guess you could stand up in it if you so desired (I typically don't because I abhor getting cobwebs in my hair) but it's pretty small. Like, it has the basic necessities (deep freeze, furnace, hot water heater, wine...) and that's pretty much it.

Overall it went really well and now we have the task of filling out a check sheet that asks about the characteristics we "will consider" and those "we will not consider." Some of these are pretty cut and dry (will we consider a child who is a high achiever? Umm...sure!) while others will require a bit of research. One thing we have learned is that it is easier in this stage to be as open as possible since a lot of these kiddos have certain characteristics marked against them based on a one time occurrence.

From here we will continue to attend the support groups offered by the agency, fill out any remaining paper work, and then welcome our worker back in our home for another series of questions. And then? And then we get to seriously start looking at children's profiles. In other words, we are getting close to the time where we can really start thinking of the children who will be playing upstairs, laughing at Murphy's antics, and eating supper with us around our kitchen table. And that is what we have been praying and waiting for for a really, really long time.