Home Study?!?

You may be wondering what this Home Study business is all about.  Basically, its an opportunity for a social work to meet with us and learn about our family.  They will be talking to us as a family and also individually about who we are and what has brought us to our interest in adoption.  They'll be making sure our home is a safe, loving environment for a child to call home as well.  I'm actually really looking forward to it because when the visits are complete (2-3...I don't really know for sure), the social worker will put together a document that tells all about our family so that our agency and China will know all about us as they match us with a child.

There is one glitch to our Home Study already, but those hiccups are to be expected in this process and we are simply rolling with the punches at this point.  Our Home Study will not be officially "complete" and ready to be authenticated in Washington, DC (the last stop before it goes to China with the rest of our Dossier) until we attend a Parenting class (called Parents In Process or PIP class) in Omaha which is only offered every other month.  This month there was a class that was offered and is actually happening right now as I type this, but we couldn't attend because I didn't want to have to take off of work my second day of school.  That would be trying to pack to pack too much in to this very busy time.  So we have to wait for the PIP class to be offered again on October 7th and 8th.  We will not have our Home Study officially complete until that time and that's okay :)

For now, we're just praying that we're healthy and strong enough for the Chinese government to consider us acceptable candidates to adopt one of their precious children.  We'll see...