The Home (Study) Stretch

It's been two months since my last post. Not that I've been lazy, quite the contrary! This home study process is very time consuming and exhausting! We had our individual interviews with our social worker, Lindsay, on February 14th. This part of the process wasn't bad at all. We mainly just answered the same questions that we wrote about in our autobiographies. Now that was a chore: summarizing your entire life, including how you "felt" about it all, in an 8-10 page paper. We both felt really comfortable with Lindsay. She is great!

Our home visit was on March 12th. Preparing for this was the exhausting part I mentioned earlier. Even though I really wasn't nervous about Lindsay coming over, I still wanted our house to look nice. So, we repainted the bathrooms and bedroom, made new curtains for the bedroom, had to clean up the junk room (future baby's room), mowed the yard for the first time this year, etc. I think you get the picture. None of this was really necessary, but it's stuff we had procrastinated about doing for a long time. Well, Lindsay came over and stayed for about an hour and a half. We showed her through the house and pointed out the safety things: fire extinguisher, smoke alarms, and so forth. The rest of the time she spent talking with Sam, mainly about chickens! (FYI - raising chickens & selling eggs is Sam's current passion/hobby.) He would not stop talking to her and before she left he had her outside petting chickens. I'm glad she's an animal lover!

Our homestudy should be complete in the next few weeks. We have to get our water tested this week, and our dogs go for their rabies shots on April 14th. Other than that we're done! We mailed our I-600 application to INS on February 17th and we received our fingerprint notice from the Dept. of Homeland Security (boy, that sounds official) about a week later. We'll go to Nashville to be fingerprinted and we will have to take a copy of our homestudy with us.

I am so thankful to God that everything has worked out so smoothly to this point. I have complete faith that He will continue to provide for us and bless us all throughout this journey. It is in His hands and I know that in His perfect timing, the day will come when we will be united with our daughter from Vietnam.