The List Must Go On

I've never been a list person. Unlike my fabulous sister and husband, it's just not in my nature. Going through the process of being verified by an adoption agency has challenged me to make and live by check lists. I've gone kicking and screaming, but now find myself creating lists as a means of exhibiting some sense of control over a situation where I otherwise have none. We started out with this little beauty along with 20 some odd pages of an application when we began our journey to becoming adoptive parents.

As you know from previous posts that many of the items on this list, held their own multi-item list as well, IE the fire inspection. Here it is only one item, but ya'll know how much doing it took to mark that one of the list!!

Now refer to the list here, yes folks, you read correctly, there is only one item left!! We only have the environmental inspection left, which for our agency is done at the home study. We took our very last class, BCMT yesterday with our pals, the Stephenson's. That experience should probably be it's own post, but lets suffice it to say, we spent a full 8 hours learning how to protect ourselves and our kids if they get aggressive. Terms like "Barbie hands" and "sumo stance" made this a rather comical experience, but we checked it off the list and that's the important thing.

Here comes the waiting part...

We heard from our agency on Friday that they plan to assign us to a home study worker on Monday and then they will call us to schedule. I am praying this worker is not overwhelmed and will be able to do our study soon so we can go on to waiting for our child, not just our verification certificate.

So in the meantime I am busying myself with yet another list of things that will be checked for the environmental inspection. The agency didn't provide us with one, so I dug through all my old forms I used while monitoring foster homes for DePelchin and found one. Basically we have to take child proofing to the extreme including locking up all medication, including over the counter, storing all cleaning supplies and any other toxic materials out of his reach, and insure that all knives and matches are also out of reach. It looks like I'll be doing a lot of climbing, since for a 6-8 year old, out of his reach is out of my reach too. But, it's going to be totally worth all the work when we have him home with us!!