Here is our puzzle progress up to date! It will be a long narrow rectangle when complete and the dimensions will be 13" x 39". As you can see we have a long ways to go to complete this project and we are asking you to consider joining with us in buying a piece or multiple pieces to help us piece together our family and a lasting keepsake. There are currently 60 pieces bought from our 1,008 piece goal. Thank you to Bethany Allen (my sister) and her boyfriend, Andrew Davies for their contributions as well this week. It will be so exciting to see it come together!!
We had our first home study meeting this past Wednesday and we met at the CAS office. This meeting was for me and Billy to attend together. I would be lying to say I wasn't nervous. We both as usual had very hectic days leading up to the meeting and after work my mom had decided it was a great day to steam clean carpets in both of our houses and had rented the steam cleaner and was unloading it at my house. On top of that Maylena has finally become very interested in potty training and I was full on working with her on that for a few hours, with great success!! So in the midst of this chaos I threw on an outfit and we rushed out the door and off to this majorly important meeting. I was feeling flustered, tired, and hungry...not a great combination for me, I'm just sayin! And all I could think is what we were headed for...the great unknown. Will this lady be nice or no sense of humor, what questions will they be asking us (especially since you are just put on the spot), what if we don't measure up??? On and on and on my mind reeled as it has almost every day and night since this process started. After grabbing our subway and inhaling it we walked up to the building and met Kim for the first time. She put my mind to ease even with our introductions. She is super nice and laid back and very thorough. We started at 7 pm and ended exactly at 9 as she predicted. The meeting was the start of expanding on our autobiographies we wrote. Learning the who, what, and why's of what brought us to this place, sharing our journeys, talking about Maylena in more detail, etc. I have no idea what I was so worried about and why I envisioned our social worker to be a person who is just going to try and find fault and strike you out. Boy was I more than glad to be proven wrong! Of course there were questions we couldn't answer right away and will need time to think on but that's ok. She briefly went over what the actual visit would be like when they come to to your house and it wasn't anything to sweat either. She laughed and looked at me like I was crazy when I told her I have been painting trim work and organizing closets etc to get ready for this. Maybe it's an adoption "nesting" phase I am going thru but we have been getting loads of work around the house done. Kim said when she comes out to people's houses for that home study visit a lot of people have made it look like a model home and then when she has to come back for the post-placement visits at 2weeks, 3 months and 6 months they are always telling her....this is what life really looks like for us. Haha!
So we have been blessed with an incredible lady to work with and our next visit is Billy meeting with Kim on November 17th. The visits have to be so many days apart, you can't get them all knocked out in a couple of weeks. Then I go for my alone visit December 3rd and it puts our official coming to the house visit around December 17th. I am already getting excited thinking about how pretty and decorated our house will be and what a fun time of year for us to be going through the process, Christmas time.
Keep checking in on the blog because there will be plenty of things upcoming to be posting about.
