Homestudy!

Our social worker, Peggy, came today to begin our home study! Woohooo!! When she left I actually felt like we're on the right track and that things are moving right along. Ian and I still have a few more papers to scrounge up(that we'll be needing for the dossier anyway) and Peggy needs to draw up a more formal draft of our discussions from today. Then she'll come back, I'll give her the paperwork I have, and then we can fill in any gaps from the info she gathered today.

The homestudy visit, itself, was really nothing to be worried about. I'd read other blogs from other pre-adoptive parents who said that they scrubbed their house from top to bottom, cleaned out the closets, bought new blinds/etc and the SW didn't even look in their closets. So, I tried not to worry about it too much, but I also saw it as a good excuse to get my house a little cleaner. She, like the other social worker, did not really look in any closets, except for the one in David's room, and I think she only did that because she was standing right by it. She did a very quick tour of the house while the girls ran ahead of her, gabbing away the whole time. By the time we were done with the tour I think she was a little overwhelmed with all of the activity of the 3 kids running around, yelling and jumping. So we had them stay and play in the loft while Ian and I went down to the table to go over paperwork and talk. The kids were so good the whole time.

She basically just took an extremely comprehensive history of Ian's life(she'll do mine on our next visit), how we were parented, how we met, our marriage, our positive and negative feelings towards each other, our child rearing philosophies, our expectations of adoption, our hopes for our children, how we will handle future racial issues and trials related to adoption(i.e.:Reaction Attachment Disorder/health problems), our disciplinary measures, etc... She was here for 3 hours and seemed very efficient, but still very nice and personable. She also sat down with Emma for a bit to get a better idea of how she feels about adoption, adding siblings, how she is disciplined, etc. She did great.

I needed to order Kenna and David's birth certificates, I still need to take a picture of our pool fence, I need to gather immunization and rabies records for our dogs...which might be a problem as I don't think we have any of those records... And Ian needs to track down a few things as well.

Altogether I thought it went very well and don't feel nervous about anything. It was nice to hear Ian analyze our marriage and say nice things about me...maybe we should have a social worker over more often!