Preparations for Home Study

Chris and I have hit the ground running with the paperwork for our Home Study, which we hope to complete before our first interview on August 6.  We've been fingerprinted at the police station and requested background checks, we've signed most of the paperwork, we finally have originals of everyone's birth certificates and we've nearly completed our essays.  Yes, essays.  This is where we write about our families and backgrounds and try to convince our social worker that our parents raised us perfectly, we never fought with our little brothers, our discipline techniques with our children are always effective and we got straight A's in school.   

The first of the Home Study interviews will take place at our house so our social worker can meet the kids and tour the house.  I've been reading enough blogs and message boards to know not to stress about the Home Visit.  Bloggers have posted pictures of their homes with captions like, "Look at our living room!  You'll never see it this clean again!"  And then they were disappointed that the social worker barely looked around.  The social worker (purportedly) doesn't come to judge you on when you last scrubbed your bathtub or by how much unfolded laundry is piled up on the couch; she visits your home to learn about your family, make sure it's safe and that there's room for another child. 

That reassurance aside, I do want her to be able to make it to the front door of our house without climbing over the tricycles, recycling bins and gardening tools that haphazardly clutter our porch, then not trip over toys or shoes when she enters the foyer, which is about the size of an airplane lavatory, and, finally, have a place to sit on the couch that's not covered in fore-mentioned unfolded laundry.  And, well, I think I'll scrub the bathtub just in case she takes a peak behind the shower curtain.

Otherwise, I'm going to hold back from a cleaning frenzy.  I was tempted to use the Home Study as an excuse to hire a housekeeper to do a deep clean, but opted to save the money and let the social worker see the real us.  Instead, the Home Study is motivating us to tackle a few larger-scale housekeeping projects.  I finally thinned out the pile of things in the back bedroom that have been hanging out ever since I moved them there to set up Soren's bedroom.  And while I hung out at the park with the kids last Sunday, Chris hosed down all the toys and trikes from the porch and then swept and mopped it. 

Now that the house is in reasonable order, I'm looking forward to inviting our social worker into our home to meet our family and learn more about us.