The Wait

Two days ago, I scanned and e-mailed some paperwork to our social worker.  And now it looks like we're done with the home study.

That's a very strange place to be.  We are finished pulling everything together for the home study and it just needs to get approved.  I don't know how long that is going to take.  That has been a frequent refrain during this process.  I call the social worker with questions, always prefacing everything with letting her know the reason I'm asking is because we've never done this before. 

But for the active part of the process, we are finished.  All we do now is wait.  We wait for the home study to be approved.  Then we wait for a birthmother to take a look at our profile and decide she would like to work with us.  By nature I'm an impatient person, so, this might turn out to be not my favorite part.

But at the same time, this is also the time we have to prepare.  I finally feel like we can start getting things together to prepare for having a baby.  We can paint the nursery, we can start gathering little gender neutral outfits and hats. 

People have told me that the active part of the adoption process is like the time in which a couple is trying to get pregnant. I think, then, the waiting period must be like the early days of the pregnancy, kind of like the first trimester.  We're excited and hopeful and just starting to make preparations.