#4- Homestudy

This past week, Em and I had the 1st of 2 meetings with our social worker (Cory) at Children's Home Society and Family Services (CHSFS). These meetings allow our social worker to get to know us better to be an advocate for us in the adoption process.

So we spent 3 hours on Tuesday, answering questions about our childhood, our family, our lives today, etc. Man, was that tough! Opening yourself up to display your strengths and weaknesses is hard enough, let alone in front of someone we just met.

We scheduled our next meeting for the 1st week in April. This will have Cory heading out to our house to finish the interrogation (ha ha!)

My mom and I are nearly done with the painting of the walls in the basement after some hard work from me and Andy with patching and drywalling. We are now getting ready to lay the tile (Andy is going to help with that too!). Things are looking good! I think we'll spend a lot more time down there now!

#3- The wait begins

Well, we have our self-study into the agency and we are waiting for them to schedule the homestudy meetings and put their paperwork together. This will give us time to get some more books on Ethiopia to learn more about the culture. We also want to learn more of the language that the child might speak. There are several dialects, so we need to figure out which ones are most common.

My mom is going to help me redo the basement, painting, tiling, and bsically cleaning things up down there. This should give us some more room to breathe and play (and work in my case).

It sounds like the wait is still a little longer than normal, so we are preparing ourselves for an October trip....but August is still a possibility!!