Crazy Paperchasin!!!!

Oh yeah....I feel like I am up to my eye balls in papers! I was doing so good because I was messing with "adoption stuff" just about ever day or every other day. Well, I took a break and now I feel like I am losing grip on stuff.

Like our homestudy is almost completely finished and ready to be reviewed by who knows how many people and then certified. And then the other day I noticed a little paragraph that I am sure I read before, that said we needed to also have out employment letter, non-employment letter, medical forms (whoo, done!), financial statement, and Ethiopia application letters all finished before our homestudy would be reviewed and finalized. Yikes! Now, I am not a total slacker, I have started these letters, and then you, sat on them a bit to marinade...you know, to see if I wanted to change or add anything.

One GREAT thing about our international agency is that they have given us our dossier list before we started on the homestudy. The reason this has been so great, is that a lot of the same info is needed for both the homestudy and the international side of things.

I'll go into what all we need for the international side of things later, but for now, here is an idea of what all we needed for the homestudy.

• We had to both fill out an autobiography questionnaire that was 6 pages long.
• Both of us had blood drawn (yuk!) and had a medical check-up to say that we are healthy.
• Financial Statement -Tells us just how much we are worth ;)
• References - For this, we had 3 wonderful friends write glowing recommendations telling of how we met them, how they think we are as a married couple and as parents.
• Medical Insurance Info
• Birth Certificates of all the family members
• Marriage License
• Military Discharge papers
• Verification of income

Wow, all that, plus 3 visits with the social worker that lasted a total of 7 hours, and $1800 later, we will have a 15 page report of our life. Aaahh, how sweet! It was completely less stressful that I thought it would be, but from what I hear of others, our homestudy was a piece of cake.

On my "paper break" we have been having some fun as a family! We went to the lake with some friends on Friday and then the pool with more friends on the 4th....finished it off with some fireworks in front of the house (we had our closest almost injury to date and needless to say, this mamma will be laying down the fireworks law until these children are legal and can buy their own fireworks!)

Fireworks!!

Yes, that's 4 kids on that jet ski...Mr. Jim is such a patient guy!