Home Visit {Update!}

Our greatly-dreaded home visit happened last night after a few days of panic and anxiety and frantic cleaning. In case you ever find yourself pursuing adoption and agonizing over your home visit, I hope you end up with a caseworker like ours. All the worry was for absolutely nothing, because she was so sweet and so non-judgmental. She didn't even examine the freshly-dusted fan blades or the dog hair that just won't come off the curtains no matter how hard I try! She didn't seem to notice the patch of unshaven hair on my knee that I'd missed that morning in the shower. She didn't cringe when Francesca sneezed on her leg or when Miss Beasley howled in the bathroom when it thundered. She didn't make a stern face and take notes when the kids got out of bed for the fifth time after being told to go to sleep. She didn't even ask questions about some of the questionable aspects of our "self studies." I would like to keep her and make clones of her to place all over the country to lessen the anxiety of adoptive parents everywhere.

After she had left, I was exhausted yet on an ecstatic high from the huge amount of relief I had! While Darling had to go take care of some work-related issues for an hour or so, I indulged my greatly-less-stressed self with a few chapters in another adoption book I'd picked up at the library. Reading story after story from people on both sides of the adoption equation added even more fuel to my adoption fire, and I'm even more excited than ever to move forward with the whole thing. (As opposed to a few days ago when I was questioning if we should even try this after all.) I know the hardest part is probably not behind us yet, but I am thrilled beyond belief at how simple this step turned out to be after all. It gives me hope that the rest of it might not be quite as bad as I expect, and that hopefully we will end up with a roly-poly baby in our arms in the near future.