Now All We Do Is Wait....

The home visit is done.

Can I say it again? The home visit is done.

It was really anticlimactic. All the millions of little things that we did to prepare based on the list we were given paid off. Because obviously being over prepared assured us a social worker that literally peeked into every room, asked to see where we keep our cleaners and our medications, where our fire extinguisher was and about our smoke detectors. That was it.

Of course there was one small snag, because lets face it there always is. She asked us to test our main smoke detector/carbon monoxide detector and the battery was dead. Luckily I am a battery hoarder and I had an extra nine volt in the garage. Whew, close one.

Oh and the other cake topper, our black lab puppy decided to show off to our social worker by humping our smaller dog and biting her neck. Thanks Buddy, you really convinced her that you are safe around kids. Jeeeez! She just laughed, and we have a dog pen so she cannot really hold that against us. I guess kids say the darndest things but dogs do the darndest things. I could have slapped him. Oh, but that is corporal punishment and isn't allowed in social worker land. Good thing I held back.

The best part of our visit was sitting in our living room with her and discussing what type of child we are interested in. It was difficult to consider the many scenarios she presented hypothetically, but it gave us some good talking points over the next six weeks or so while she compiles our homestudy.

What we know:

• We will be going into both the fos-adopt program AND the relinquishment program. This means we could either be matched with a child in the foster care system OR we could be chosen by a birth mom and develop an adoption plan with her for her unborn child. More info on how we made that decision in a later post.
• If our little one comes to us from the foster care system he/she (we didn't specify a gender preference) will be under 3 years of age. This was increased a year after a lot of discussion between us and our social worker.
• We are open to a sibling set of two if they are close in age or are twins.
• We are open to all races.
• We are open to minor, treatable medical conditions. Such as a baby that wears oxygen because he/she was born prematurely. Or perhaps some malnutrition because of neglect.

We haven't gotten much feedback from our letter that we sent to family and friends this holiday. We got a few, "best of luck to you with starting your family." And we got some ignorant comments such as, "you won't really have to adopt, you'll get pregnant before then." Or another horrible comment that makes me literally bite my tongue, "what if the kid is damaged from their birth family."
In response to the first statement: I've been trying to get pregnant for the past almost three years, and it didn't happen. This is how we are starting our family. If a pregnancy happened somehow, we would be grateful, but we'd still adopt.
In response to the second, horrible statement: I know plenty of people with biological kids who are pretty "damaged" too. If I was pregnant you wouldn't say that to me, so don't say it now. Thanks a-hole.

It's all in time. Adoption is not a very well known topic to many of the people in our lives, so we have to be patient with our loved ones and educate them on adoption.

So now, we wait while our social worker writes our homestudy. Then it goes to the agency director for editing. We've been given the time frame of mid-February before our profile "goes live." This should be the next phone call we get.

We are almost there.