Announcement

Mixed reception to the email sent to family/friends. I was surprised by my mothers side responded quickly and w the exception of one aunt. My fathers side was relatively silent though this will be great-grandchild #2. Only one cousin responded and her response was sweet and excited. Our friends were excited as was DHs extended family. It's hard to figure out what to expect since I don't know anyone that has gone through this... I can only compare it to friends and family that have announced their pregnancys and it's hard not to compare. I guess I'll have to get better at letting things roll off and come up w better/more one liners. This experience though has really shown me that your expectations are often not met by those you have expectations of and those you had little expectation of often surprise you.

News

Family & Friends,

DH & I are excited to announce that we have been approved to be adoptive parents through the home study process.  As some of you already know we started the process in April and our final interview was tonight!  Our Dear Birth parent book is now available to be shown to birth parents.  We will be working with our agency as well as the birth parents to hopefully allow for an open adoption which will allow for an exchange of pictures, letters and possibly even visits after our baby arrives.

We want to thank all of our family and friends that have written letters of recommendation as well as wrote pages in our Dear Birth parents book.  Thank you for taking the time to listen when we complained about being finger printed and helping us write what our "parenting style" will be.

At this point in the process we wait until we are matched with a birth parent.  Unlike a pregnancy, our wait to be matched could be months or years but once matched we will only have a few months or possibly weeks to prep for the arrival of our first baby!  We hope we have big news soon!

Me & DH

This is it!

We were specifically directed NOT to clean.  It was challenging, I'll admit I cleaned two weeks ago, one of those deep cleans where I cleaned the stove, cars, under couches, dusted, got on hands and knees to wipe floors cleaned.  Last weekend I purposefully did not clean.  As the social worker was touring our house tonight though I started noticing ALL of the things that were SO dirty!!  Oh well.

The interview went well.   Our dear birth parent books were between the doors when I got home from work and I immediately opened the package and started to look at it sitting on the porch.  I was going to make dinner before she arrived but realized that though for once I remembered to defrost the meat before I left for work we didn't have any pasta.  Oh well.

She arrived a few minutes late, loved our cat, liked our dog and we sat down to answer questions.  Most of the questions were already answered in our written application (as in past interviews) but she wanted us to elaborate.  Its frustrating for me as I know she has the answers, and seriously what parent knows their exact parenting style before having kids.  We at least both agree on no spanking.  DH is better at answering questions I just felt like telling her to read our application (she did warn us that we may have this reaction). Oh well.

She walked through our house not saying much but writing.  Kinda odd.  Who knows what she was writing but the fact that she had few questions and little to say hopefully was a good thing.  She did mention the no fire extinguisher next to the fire place which during the first interview (the one where she told us everything we needed to do) that fire places didn't need extinguishers only wood burning stoves- while a fire place is not a wood burning stove.  oh well.

She left without our books because I wanted to hand write some things as well as sign our names at the end.  I made a mistake over one picture and wrote that it was our 2nd not 3rd anniversary trip that the picture was taken on.  They will never know so- oh well :)

All the hard work is behind us and now we wait....