Home study visit complete!

Today we completed the home visit portion of our home study.  We had heard horror stories of how social workers would look through your closets, your kitchen cabinets and grill you about your childhood.  In preparation, we cleaned our house top to bottom.  I don't want to give anyone the wrong idea, we keep a clean house, but it takes on a whole new form when you know a stranger is coming to check you out and evaluate you and your home.  You start to see all of the little things that you put off fixing and feel an urgency to get it fixed...now.  At least I did.  Jim not as much, but he humored me.  We also had to face laundry mountain.  Let me explain.  We live in a home built in the 30's, so it has a lot of charming features.  One convenient feature is a laundry chute.  We are pros at throwing clothes into the chute and they are whisked away to our basement laundry room.  It is fantastic!  The only down side is that once we get the laundry to the basement and wash it, we lack the motivation at times to fold it and carry it up 2 flights of stairs to our bedrooms on the 2nd floor.  Embarrassing to admit, the clean laundry pile in the basement becomes mountain-like, so we've dubbed it laundry mountain.  We made a pact to start folding laundry and putting it away as soon as it comes out of the dryer, but check in with us next month to see if that works out. Back to the home study.

  Our experience today was really good.   Our social worker was in our home for just under 3 hours and she did ask us a lot of questions, but in a way that made it seem like she was "on our side".  She didn't look in a single drawer or cabinet.  Now that we are over this hurdle, we wait for the first draft of the written home study.  Once prepared, it will be sent to our agency and we can officially be put on a waiting list for a child.  The social worker indicated it is likely to take 30 days, but we are crossing our fingers that it will be ready before that. Thank you to everyone for offers to help us get our home ready and for prayers that today would go well.