Well friends, I have taken the serenity prayer to heart this week and stopped being so obsessive. Many of the things we are waiting for now are out of our hands so there isn’t anything I can do to hurry along the process. Steve had his police letter re-done so it is correct now. We received our state criminal check clearances back yesterday. For the homestudy we are waiting on our 3 reference letters to be written by our friends, our state child abuse clearances, and the actual homestudy to happen (next Saturday). For our dossier, we are waiting for both of our birth certificates to arrive, Steve’s employment verification letter, and letters from the doctors (we both have appointments on Wednesday). Then we will take everything that was notarized to be certified and turn in our I-600A and receive fingerprint appointments. Of course there are some other items that we will have to wait for for the adoption agency to approve our homestudy (like the $%#@ HIV results – I’m a little bitter lol).

With the home study scheduled for 1 week from today, I made yet another list. This one is titled “Things to be done before home study”. It’s a 2 page list of things to clean or fix or put away before the social worker comes. (Items such as ‘put all the crap in the closet’ are included on the list.) I am probably less stressed about the home study than many people simply because I’ve visited many houses over the years as a social worker. But, that doesn’t preclude there being a list. Steve knows about the list, has seen the list, ridiculed me for making the list, but has probably not read the list. Last night he says to me “let’s paint the bedroom this weekend”. We bought paint in January to paint our bedroom. He wanted to do a ‘technique’ on the walls so we have one color of paint and 2 colors of glaze to rag onto the walls. This is a big project which will likely take us a couple of weeks. And after putting it off for 4 months, he decides the weekend before the home study is the time to start?!? Needless to say, “we” decided to wait until after the homestudy to start.