Home Study Week

I know it has been a little while since an update, but this is a good one! These last few weeks have flown by. We spent two weeks, before our first home visit ever, finishing up our projects around the house. We finished the workshop/playhouse, cleaned out closets and cabinets, organized the garage, and our favorite part was that we started putting together the nursery!

At this point, the nursery has new floors, new paint, and some other fun baby stuff we got as Christmas gifts. We will post pictures as soon as we get some furniture in there. We have found ourselves walking in there for no reason and just smiling. It is turning out better than we ever imagined.

Our home study was last Monday. I want to go ahead and publicly apologize to my beautiful wife. She had to live with a stressed out monster for a couple weeks. I wanted to make sure everything was perfect. I was having visions of someone coming into our house with white gloves on and searching for reasons why we would not be suitable for parenthood. Those of you that have been through a home study know that is absolutely ridiculous. Our caseworker, Jennifer, came in and made herself right at home. I prepared lunch and dessert, so it really just felt like we were sitting and talking with a friend over a meal. I had to make a point to tell Jennifer that "You are really sweet, but I have been terrified of you all week!"

As she was leaving she told us that she didn't want us worrying. She said that she has to formally type up about a 16 page review on our home study, but that we should be receiving our approval package in the mail in about a month. HALLELUJAH!!!

So in the meantime we will be working on completing our profile book. We are about halfway to our next financial goal of our second set of agency fees. After we receive our approval package and have our next fee then we can start sending out our book. Then the waiting game begins! It could be a couple months or over a year. We are trying to hope conservatively, and pray that we will have our baby home by this Christmas.

We have been dreaming of bringing a baby home for the last five years. Even during our infertility treatments we were always too scared to start shopping for baby stuff. Jennifer told us that we won't know when we will be matched, but what we do know is that our baby will be here soon. So for the first time, Jill spent all day yesterday shopping for nursery stuff. It was a huge turning point in our journey. For the first time, we both felt like it was OK to start building a room for our baby. We are beyond excited about how far we have come in such a short amount of time. We are truly blessed for everything and everyone that got us to where we are today!