Elly emailed us last Friday and said she was ready to set up our home visit and asked if we could do it this week, before she left for vacation. We thought we would have a lot more notice, so we (meaning I) went into panic mode. We originally set it up for Monday, but there was a birth that morning so Elly had to stay and help the birth and adoptive parents get everything sorted out, and we rescheduled for Tuesday.

That gave me a total of 4 days to prepare. Ah!

Now, I know everyone says the home visit isn’t really that scary.. and we don’t need to worry about all that cleaning, and she won’t care if our baseboards haven’t been scrubbed, and she won’t notice if I didn’t lint roll all of my curtains, and it doesn’t matter if I haven’t washed the outside of that window in a year or two, and a million other little things. But.. I did it anyway.

And guess what? She didn’t even check my baseboards! Turns out everyone was right. She really just wanted to make sure that we were relatively normal people with a safe home in a safe neighborhood. The good news is, my house has never been so clean!

 

So Elly came and sat with us in the living room for a couple hours and talked with us about pretty much everything. She asked specifics about our extended families, our siblings, our upbringings, and our plans for the future. We talked about favorite vacation spots, holiday traditions, and what we do for fun.

We also had to come up with each other’s strengths and weaknesses, which apparently are required by the state?

Weird.

In case you wondered, Kyle’s weakness is lack of attention to detail and mine is a tendency to be a little “pessimistic” .. at least, those are the only ones we were willing to admit to!

A lot of it was just going into more detail about what we had written in our family assessment. It wasn’t bad at all, and we actually enjoyed the chance to sit and chat with Elly. Brisa did, as well.. but she was so pesty that I had to go stash her in the bedroom. Elly said she’s never seen met such a “friendly” cat.

After we talked, she wanted a quick tour of the house.

She commented of the fact that we have a real dining room and a nicely-sized kitchen (my favorites, too!).

She had no interest in actually seeing either the basement or the garage (thank you, Lord).

She laughed with us about the mystery of our “mystery room” (that’s the room off of the upstairs bathroom that has no apparent purpose, but will soon be an AMAZING walk-in closet).

And she even spent a while admiring our gallery of Maurer Movie posters. How awesome is that??

Once our little tour was over, and she was satisfied that there was no hidden meth lab or blatant safely concerns, we sat back down in the living room to talk about our next step.

She assured us that we were, indeed, “approved” and she would be sending us a copy of the home study write-up sometime within the next week or two for our review.

Do you know what that means??

That means we are close! In a matter of days, we will officially have a completed home study!

The next thing for us to do is put together our profile book, which we will be working on in the next couple of weeks. We hope to have it mostly done by the time Elly returns from vacation on the 12th.

And then we will be in the pool, ready to be shown to birth mothers. We will be a “waiting family!”