We had our in-home visit for our Home Study with our Social Worker on 1/26/09. Everyone told me not to be nervous for it and it’s not a big deal, but you can’t help and worry when someone will come to your house and make sure it’s appropriate place for children. We know it would be a great place to raise children but, you can’t help but wonder if someone else know this too by looking at it.
We did some very early spring cleaning and reorganizing before hand. Took all the Holiday decorations down and packed them away in the garage. Purchased a couple more plastic bins to store my random craft stuff we have stored in what will one day be a babies room. I really wanted to start baby proofing the house just to show we were ready, yet I didn’t want it to look like we tried to hard either, and come out looking like we faked our entire home environment.
I sent Jason out to buy some sort of Breakfast treat… I was thinking a banana bread loaf, crossiants, or danishes of some type from our local bakery. We found out the hard way that the bakery is closed on Monday’s and he returned home with two containers of cookies. Large chocolate chip ones, and those yummy melt in your mouth sugar cookies with those neon frosting on the top. THEY taste great… but for BREAKFAST!!! I freaked out for 2 minutes and was able to keep that all in my head, wondering if they would think we would serve a child cookies for breakfast too… Finally I just shook it off and watched Jason put the cookies on a decorative plate as I made some coffee.. Oh well, if they deny people for something as simple as offering cookies to a social worker at 8am, then I would worry.
We gave our Social Worker a quick tour of the house and she was quiet and just took a few notes here and there. She smiled when I told her we wanted to make our upstairs living room into a playroom and when I pointed to how we would get a baby gate for the stairs so it would be safe. I’m not sure if she smiled because she liked that we thought it out and it was a good plan or if she thought I was funny for planning it and sharing it with her. Either way, the smile made me feel like we had done something right. She didn’t look in any closets or drawers. (Jason was worried about us having Tylenol or other medications in the medicine cabinet – in case a child could get at them) I KNOW WE WERE WAY TO WORRIED ABOUT THIS VISIT! 
We sat in our living room and all drank coffee while we answered questions about our homework she assigned to visit the Latin Market by my work, and random essay questions that she wanted more detail on.
Things I thought she would ask about never came up. She asked a lot of questions about our community, plans for childcare, childhood memories, and how we support each other as a couple. It still felt like an interview but it was much more relaxed and comfortable. The meeting went very well.
She said our Home Study was basically completed now, we just have to do the Hague background check that may take several weeks (Since we are adopting from Colombia and they are a Hague Country) before it could be official.
The meeting started at 9:30am and we finished at 11:30am.
