Brief update and an important landmark.

And now we wait...

We are now licensed to be foster parents. Amy and I received our licenses last week. After our third and final home visit where we chatted with Kim (our licensor) about what adoption and family mean to us we got an email with a rough draft of our "Home Study" document for us to proof read. Kim had done a great job of putting all of our information into words and describing our lives and our feelings and intentions about adoption. After some computer difficulty (openoffice.org is a great free office suite of software, but doesn't play as nicely with MS Word docs as it should) we managed to convey the small corrections to Kim over the phone and our licenses were signed later that day.

Now the real waiting begins. If you didn't know us and you looked at our house you would think we had a child whose clothes and toys had gone missing. Since we don't know if we're going to get a boy or a girl and if they're going to be 1 month or 4 years old we can't really get those things. What we do have is a room with a crib and a bed, a changing table, a potty seat in the bathroom, safety gates at the stairs, outlet covers in all the outlets, and child resistant latches on the cabinets. We have a carseat that will only meet our needs for a 1+ year old or if we only drive the Jeep (the Mazda's back seat is a bit small for the large convertible seat.) We also have fewer places for a curious child to fall down and go BOOM. The bit of wall that was missing in the master bedroom around our stairs is fixed (but could use some paint), the stairs to the basement have a more functional set of railings and the yard is now blocked from the steep blackberry bramble and nettle covered hill and ravine.

It is now like we are pregnant with no idea of a due date. Every call on our phones could be about the child soon entering our lives. It's a bit crazy; how old, what gender, what ethnicity and heritage, what kind of family history, WHEN? Who knows.

Brian