We were Rock Stars!

Sarah arrived 20 minutes early for our home study. That's quite alright! I was ready. Daddy is always ready. The kitties were ready.

Sarah is our social worker assigned to assess our fitness and readiness to adopt a child from another country. Her role in our entire future didn't hit me until after she left. Perhaps that is because she completely put me at ease with her professionalism and humanity. Daddy never gets nervous.

We had decided that we were answering every question with complete honesty as we having nothing to hide. We live our lives as open books and are very open people. I think Sarah definitely sensed that in us. We had a very natural dialogue and covered many positive aspects f our nature, some sad times, and some challenges. The experience was completely opposite of my anticipated terror. We WANTED Sarah to know who we were and what we were about. We wanted her to give us a vote of confidence that we did indeed have what it took to be great parents.

Her feedback to us stunned me. She said that we were two of the most amazing people she had worked with since she had been doing home studies. She said that our documentation submission was organized and complete before the home visits even took place and that didn't happen as often as we thought. She said our finances were perfect and she could very easily trace our reported income to our bank statements and our bank statements to our reported expenses. She commented on our "lovely home" and "affectionate kitties" (HA! If she only knew what I just went though!). The most complimentary thing she said to us however, was that we articulated our thoughts and ideas about who we were, how we related to each other, and how we planned to nuture our child with incredible insight and focus. She said she had never seen anyone with a more well researched, concrete parenting plan. A minimum of two home visits are required at least 7 days apart for the home study. While we covered most everything, she wanted to leave something for us to talk about next time. She plans to go over our relationship and finances more and she was going to do the actual home inspection on visit two, but I asked her to go ahead to do the inspection now because Daddy was just chomping at the bit to have some chaos at least in the laundry room! She did her walk through and on the way out, I told her that I knew that she couldn't tell me "officially" but I had heard from several places that the first home visit was critical in determining whether you will be approved or not. I asked her if that was true and she said that she usually could make a determination after visit one. I asked her if we had good reason to go ahead and celebrate. She smiled and winked at me and said "Oh . . . . I think you already know the answer to that."

And then I exhaled . . . . . .

In "trying to conceive world" the letters BFP stand for Big Fat Positive . . . as in a positive pregnancy test. Now it stands for Big Fat Positive . . . . as in a positive outcome for being approved for our adoption in our home study process.

I do believe we are going to have a baby.