New Year, New Hope

I am very much looking forward to this new year beginning.  We have come so far since this point last year.  At this time last year I was still processing our first IUI that had failed. I was going through a short bout of feeling a little depressed. In March we did our second IUI, which also failed, and shortly after that is when we made the decision to adopt. We have spent months upon months filling out paper work, taking classes, and doing our home study in order to prepare for foster care.  The beginning of this year will include finally being certified to foster, and hopefully shortly after that getting an actual placement of a baby that we can love on and provide a safe, loving environment for. I'm so excited!!!

Home Study

Wow, we are two thirds of the way through our home study process!!  These last few weeks have been quite hectic for us. We have been doing so much to prepare for these visits. We donated a bunch of stuff, and moved even more stuff to our storage unit. It's been a long time since our apartment looked this good, lol. I definitely should have taken some before and after photos. I will try to do that for the nursery.  It is already most of the way set up, the crib is almost complete (we are missing some bolts and had to order them) and we have our changing table ready with tons of storage. I still need to put up a couple of decorations and move some of the furniture around.

This week we had 2 of the 3 visits. The actual part where they looked around our home lasted maybe 5 minutes. The rest of it has consisted of interviews. Both visits lasted about 2 1/2 hours. The first one wasn't bad at all, it seemed very light. Tonight's was a lot more in depth, but not as bad as I thought it would be. We had even more paper work that we had to fill out this week, as if the whole application wasn't enough, lol. I actually really enjoy filling out stuff like that, so I'm not complaining.

We have one more visit this upcoming Tuesday afternoon, and assuming that we get everything completed then (there's a small possibility that we may need one more visit, depending on how long next weeks takes) then we will just have to wait for one of our government background checks to finally come back and we will hopefully be officially certified to accept foster care placements! We are so excited!  Once that happens we will be able to say that we are "paper pregnant", and I can't wait!