And We're Off!

Thanks for the many prayers and words of encouragement so many of you offered us as we went into our first meeting with our social worker to officially start our home study on Saturday. We definitely felt God's peace throughout the meeting and continue to see his hand work out the details for us.

I won't go into a lot of details about everything we talked about with Sharon on Saturday, but if I were to summarize what the goal of our first meeting with her was it would be that she get to know us and we get to know her. It sounds simple. And it really was. If anyone reading this is considering adoption, but you are hesitant because of all the details and all the people who seem to be scrutinizing you... have no fear... it isn't as scary as it might seem. Maybe God's even nudging you to begin this incredible journey to expand your family through adoption.

The big questions she asked us were why we decided to adopt and why we decided to adopt now, how we met, what fears or concerns we have about adoption, what is our marriage like and what do we as a couple disagree about and how do we resolve disagreements and how do we make big decisions. Those might sound like daunting questions, but many of them we had already written out answers to in our application or autobiographies and talking with Sharon was not intimidating at all.

She asked us if we wanted her to do the official "walk through" of our house or if we wanted to do it another time. We of course wanted her to do it Saturday since we had spent 2 1/2 hours cleaning the night before and honestly, our house was probably the cleanest it had been since we moved in. The questions she asked us about our house (square footage, number of bedrooms, how old, etc) took longer than her actually walking through our house. Part of me wanted her to open the shower curtain so she could see the bathtub that I had scrubbed as clean as possible the night before. :)  But the other part of me was relieved to know that she was not evaluating how good we could clean our house, but instead was evaluating if our home was safe to bring a child into and if our home had room to bring a child into. She spent more time admiring the quilt my mom and I had made for our bed than anything else. Really, it took probably 2 minutes and I'm not exaggerating. She did say this part of the home study for foster care is a much more detailed process so for those of you who have been approved for foster care I greatly admire you and appreciate what you do.

Before she left, we scheduled the second meeting with her that will be this upcoming Friday (October 26th) at 5 pm and we scheduled the third meeting that will be on our day off on November 12th at 2 pm. She said more than once that she does not see anything in our application or in the info we shared with her that will cause any hiccups in the home study and we might even be able to complete the home study early. When she said this, I think I had to wrap my fingers around the church pew I was sitting on  in our living room so I would not leap for joy. When we initially applied, I had a pie in the sky hope that we could complete the home study by the end of the year. Now, I know there is still no guarantee, but just knowing it is a possibility that one thing in this process might go faster than expected is encouraging to this task-oriented, Type A, number-crunching, detail-driven math nerd. :)