I am beginning to think the recurring theme for the Home Study might be, “Well, that wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.”

Yesterday was our second home study visit.  Once again, I had a plan and that plan did not happen.  I thought I would take the boys to Mother’s Day Out, get in half a workout, wash my hair and get ready, and grab lunch on the way to Murfreesboro.  Instead I rushed home after the gym, took a quick shower, threw in some dry shampoo, did my 5-minute face (thank you to all of those late night binges of What Not To Wear in college), and headed back to Mother’s Day Out and picked up Elliott.  He had a blowout diaper, more than could be handled in the classroom, and had to be brought home for a bath.  I packed an entire purse full of Oreos and suckers thinking I would have to take him to the adoption interview with me, but thankfully our neighbor and life group host offered so generously to watch Elliott so we could focus during the meeting.  (THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU)

I was a little on edge already, but we were starved so we decided to hit the Chick-fil-a drive thru on the way.  I am a reasonable human being who ordered grilled chicken nuggets.  Josh ordered chicken tortilla soup.  To eat while driving.  And he did not bring a change of clothes.

So my stress level did not go down.  However, Vietnam Vets was closed down to one lane, so Josh had almost 30 minutes of barely moving to eat his soup without any problems.  Unfortunately, the traffic delay made us late.

Thankfully our social worker was also running late, so we ended up arriving a few minutes before she did and even had time to order coffee.

So it all turned out totally fine, but I wasn’t as relaxed or confident as I had expected to be due to the interruptions of the morning.

Our social worker had our autobiographies in hand, and I braced myself for an interrogation.  But none came.

Several spots on the autobiography stated “brief answers, will discuss in interview” or something of that nature.  To me, two paragraphs is brief.  For her, it was more than enough information to complete the home study.  No formal interview was needed.  THANK GOD.  So we spent most of the time reviewing our Hague Training and doing some general adoption Q & A.  The whole visit only took about 45 minutes.

She ended it by telling us she was going to work on writing the home study report and would schedule the next meeting for when it was nearly done.  Just to recap from earlier posts, the process is:  write the report (1 – 2 weeks), send for internal review (2 – 4 days), send to us (2 – 3 days), send to agency (3 days – 2 weeks), send to Korea for translation and await referral.

We learned today that our final visit will be on Sunday afternoon!  I am so hopeful that this means we will have the whole thing ready to go by the end of March!

From other adoptive parents I’m following and conversations with our agency and social worker, it looks like 2 – 4 months was fairly common for 2017 waits between sending the dossier and receiving a referral.  I’m clinging to hope we will know our child’s name this summer!