Celebrating With Sushi

Here we are with a small but important fraction of our family who helped us celebrate our final homestudy visit.

When Brian and I had our orientation phone call with AGCI, Kari explained to us that adoption is an up and down process with a series of small milestones beforing reaching the final goal of expanding our family. Yesterday we reached another small milestone in our process. We had our final meeting with our social worker (at least until after the baby is home). Lori came over to our house to inspect it. It was much less of an inspection and more of a "giving the tour" like we would for any guest. Our place is cozy so I'm pretty sure it took all of 3 minutes. She did comment on how cute and clean the place was so I would consider that a success. Knowing how small our house is made me really curious as to what could possibly take 2 hours. We ended up sitting down and chit chatting for just about the full 2 hour estimate. We answered questions that were still unclear after our one-on-one interviews. What I really liked about this appointment (if you can call it that because it was so much more comfortable than an "appointment") was that we talked more about the post-adoption experiences. We were able to discuss things like being a transracial family, how each of us are going to respond to racism, how we will react differently, and how we will teach our child about racism. We also talked about sleeping methods and how the methods need to be different for an adopted child who needs to learn to feel secure. We discussed attachment and bonding, traveling (and how scared I am that I will be THAT mom with the screaming baby on the plane and that I will be a stranger and no comfort at all to my baby), and about how messy my house will be with toys all over. Brian and I have been very blessed with a social worker who is incredibly easy to talk to, not intimidating, and truly treats us with care and wants to educate us. What an answer to prayer! Now - we wait. We wait for the FBI so Lori can complete our homestudy report. We are still hoping for the end of March.

Here's what we did all week in preparation for the home visit.

We painted our blue wall a NEW blue, re-caulked the tub/shower, and planted some flowers (our concrete slab of a backyard has never looked so good). We had to be extra careful of our new neighbors living in the BBQ. Brian discovered them the night before as he was going to cook some steaks. Luckily he opened the lid before turning it on! We ended up broiling those steaks... Of course we also did some major spring cleaning, including cleaning out and reorganizing the closets.