PAPERWORK IS IN THE MAIL!!!!

What a wonderful feeling to mail all of the paperwork today that we have been working on for the past 3.5  months!!!  I feel like everything is finally set in motion now:-) 

So what happens next?  After our materials are reviewed by the agency we will be assigned a social worker to begin our "home study."  The home study is a series of meetings/interviews with the social worker at your home to learn more about your family and to help educate and prepare you for adopting a child.  Part of it is also evaluating your home to make sure it is a safe place for a child to be raised.  This, by law, must involve us doing things like creating and posting fire escape plans and keeping a log of monthly smoke detector tests (really state of VA...aren't monthly records a bit excessive?).  Luckily, Cody went to an estate sale yesterday and picked up another fire extinguisher since we have to have one on every floor, ha. 

Many people think this home study is a pass/fail situation which is not true.  The agency wants you to succeed in adopting a child, they are on your side, so they are there to help educate and prepare you as necessary.  The only tricky thing with our home study is the fact that we may or may not be in a new house by the time we bring our daughter home.  The agency told us in the beginning this wouldn't be an issue and we would just have to do a "revised home study" when we move into the new house (for an additional fee, of course).  So, that is the plan for now.  I'm not sure how long the home study should take, they say it depends a lot on your availability for meetings.  I'm hoping by the end of the summer our home study will be completed and then we will officially be "on the list" waiting to be matched with a child.