We are approved!

Our social worker said our homestudy is approved as of yesterday! We are officially pregnant on paper! She has to actually write up the report and I imagine that will happen in the next week or so. It will be sent to our attorney and our agency when we sign with them. This is great news!

Now we just have to get the room ready...

Finishing homestudy next week

Next Tuesday is our infant CPR class and next Thursday is our final visit with our social worker for our homestudy. We still need to complete some short answer questions that we have already discussed and print off some tax forms, but other than that we are ready. We had our infant care class 2 weekends ago and it was really helpful. We were the only people in the class so the teacher really customized it for us. Our teacher had adopted 2 children and was in the process of adopting her 3rd. She had gone to a traditional baby care class for her first child and found it to be a weird situation when the other women were talking about leaky nipples and she was more concerned about post-placement visits. We learned about basics like bathing, feeding, changing diapers, how to care for an umbilical cord, when to call the doctor and tips for bonding. She addressed a lot of issues specific to adoptive parents and had some good tips for how to survive the first 6 weeks. I can already tell we are better prepared than some other parents. Tonight we were at target looking at different types of diaper rash cream and overheard a woman who was registering ask her friend what baby oil is even used for. Her friend said it was used to keep the baby's skin from drying out. Of course, we know from the class that we should never use baby oil on a baby...

Today I spoke with an agency here in Columbus that I had considered but not initially wanted to use. I was concerned that their required classes and orientation would have delayed us becoming active by several months. However the person I talked to today felt that with an approved homestudy we would probably be activated right away because they need families for their program. Their fees are a bit less than the other agency we are considering. We'll decide which one to use later this summer.