Homestudy Olympics

Our assigned social worker, Pamela, wins the GOLD. She was great, our second, and last visit was this afternoon. She came with almost all the report written and was there for all of 1.5 hours only!

She grilled E for 45 minutes... ok, she didn't grill him but knowing E like I do any personal questions about his childhood would feel like a grilling to him! I talked to her for a bit also about growing up, my parents, my brothers, etc. It was fun and I will honestly miss her.

So to Pamela, here's your gold medal:
honestly, a can't imagine a better person to have 'grill' you (just kidding Pamela) or a quicker/smoother process. The report will be done on Tuesday with final edits by Friday. We'll then only be waiting on our home health inspection finalization and the state fingerprint clearance (expected to take 4-6 more weeks -uggghhhh). But this feels like such a HUGE milestone and one I know that E is sooooo glad to put behind him. REally, I cna't believe our homestudy process from start to finish was 2 weeks. We should see the 'final' draft late this week! COOL :)

On Monday we'll mail the next big packet out for our Dossier, this will include:

copies of 1040's
proof of health insurance
our photos from the house and our family
photocopies of our passports
3 sets of passport sized photos
our personal letter to the Chinese Government about why we want to and should adopt
our statement of financial net worth
Statement of guardianship for the child we don't have yet! (only item not finalized on this list, just need to write it and hope we don't have to involve a lawyer $$$ to make it 'official'!

Here are 2 pics from our latest version (and last version) of Dossier photos:






We also agreed that once we are DTC we will start to finish (oxymoron eh?) the nursery. The Dossier list of suggested photos includes one of the future child's room. So even though it's a work in progress we've included it. Of course it's been painted for almost a year now and the bookshelf is now on the wall, which was a major milestone for us last week. There's still work to do: put the crib together (still in the box...), move the dresser behind the rocking chair to the basement, hang all the Sun and Moon photos, box up a shitload of size 0-3 clothes and determine what we're finally going to do with all the other infant items we no longer have a use for that are boxed in the closet, many brand new. I'm not sure we're up to that yet, but when we finally let go of it all, some lucky set of parents will hit the motherload... pun intended! Our loss will truly be someone else's gain.

We are also compiling a mental list of things to do while we wait that long time till a child is referred to us. Trips to visit family and friends we rarely get to see, repairs on the house (all of the downstairs, foyer and stairway need the builder's white covered up!), outside masonry work, local travel, etc. Should be fun, ok, some of it should be fun. We're still wondering how the hell to paint our cathedral ceilings and who's going to lose rock, paper, scissors and get stuck with it!