Homestudy at Home

Well today we had our last official homestudy meeting! Our social worker, Deb, came over around 10:30 a.m. and took a look at our place, making sure we had adequate space for kids, smoke alarms, and carbon monoxide detectors. (We did. Phew!) We sat at the kitchen table and began discussing the process from here on. She estimated that we could potentially go on the waiting list starting around March. :) Fingers crossed!

It was actually quite idyllic. It started to snow shortly after she got here, and we all sat at the kitchen table, drinking strong coffee and watching the antics of the birds outside at the feeders in the snowfall while we talked. (The starlings made a couple of Westside-Story-Jets-appearances that stopped all conversation momentarily. It was like a scene out of The Birds.) She's already begun some of the preliminary work on our homestudy report, and will continue with that now that our final in-person interview is finished. (We have a quick phone interview at the end of the month to make sure all our ducks are in a row.)

One of the more serious things she mentioned were that the children in Ethiopia are very malnourished and can be severely underweight when they are adopted. While we knew this, it was still sobering to hear, and made me a little sick to think of my future children possibly starving as we speak. We also learned that adopting 2 siblings, which we plan to do, means that the older one can be up to 4 years old (thus my comment about our oldest child being alive already), assuming that we don't get twins. She stressed that we should talk to other families that have adopted more than one child at a time and make sure this is the right decision for us, given the extra challenges. While we will definitely follow her advice, we know we want two and thus still feel good about our decision. We've already communicated a few other families who said adopting siblings was one of the best choices they made.

All in all, it went very well, and we felt great after she left, knowing that our two-year gestation period may begin relatively soon ... We now have four online courses to take, one day-long course on Jan 23, and our 1-600 form to send in, and then we'll have done everything for our homestudy and can start the dossier.

Onward and upward! Wishing you all a peaceful and fun-filled New Year!

Love,
Katrina

Last Homestudy Meeting and a New Year!

Greetings! Tomorrow is a big day ~ our last homestudy meeting. This one, however, is not at the WHFC office in Waltham, but in our home. Today is a whirlwind of cleaning and making sure all our smoke alarms, carbon monoxide detectors are working. Our two designated kid rooms are presently 1) a guest room and 2) a storage room. So definitely not nursery stage yet, though that would be a silly thing to start now, as we have a long way to go until that point. That said, however, my mind is beginning to consider possibilities/colors/designs.

We just got back from our whirlwind tour of Virginia/Pennsylvania (okay, PA was only a few hours...sorry PA family--we'll stay longer next time--we had to get back in time to clean this year for our meeting...It stunk not having more time to visit you all and relax.) On our way back, we listened to a podcast about organizing and designing rooms based on zones; essentially, how to make your living space fit you and work in an organized way. I got quite inspired, and am thinking more about each space, particularly my office space, which I barely use now. I'd love to use it to get back into my art.

This past summer, with Ryan's persistent loving urging (and ultimately his signing me up behind my back) I took a wonderful watercolor course at the small art museum here in Framingham. Ryan rocks. I LOVED the course. It was 5 full days in a row, during one of the hottest weeks of the summer, and I happily painted for about 8 hours each day. Once the course was over, though, I stopped. I'm having trouble getting back into the zone, and I think if I get my office space more inviting, I'll feel that urge to return to that great place. I'm quite inspired to work on this. I abandoned my visual artist side almost as soon as I left high school, and painting and drawing again felt like reuniting with an old, dear friend. I'd love to make that a regular part of my life again.

Hope the New Year brings forth inspiration to each of you to enjoy what makes you most happy! We are incredibly lucky to have such a supportive and delightfully wacky (in the best sense) constellation of friends and family cheering us on. We look forward to the day that we introduce you to our children!

Lots of love,
Katrina

Confession about Antlers

So....I did something this past week that surprised me. I bought Christmas items with our two future children in mind. It was a small but huge move, as I'm admittedly nervous that I'll jinx things with too much optimism. But I simply couldn't help myself.

At Russells Garden Center, I was hunting for some stockings for Ry and I, as suddenly realized we had no stockings. (It's our first Christmas we're spending at home and not traveling, so it was an easy oversight in past years.) I was perusing the fun little gizmos they had there, when I saw something so silly and precious, my heart skipped a beat: two pairs of headband antlers with little bells on them. (the last two on the shelves, by chance!) I immediately pictured our two kids (who are they??) wearing them and skipping about the tree in night-before-Christmas-hyper-activity. And I knew that these antlers must be ours. They now sit by our Seuss-like tree, hinting at the future. We wear them, of course, (hello! How can you not put on a pair of jingly antlers? impossible!) but it feels more like we're borrowing them and breaking them in for the two little heads that are somewhere in some way on their way to us.

jingle jingle ...

Long time, no write

Long absence from the Flemin's! Sorry for the silence! We've been in the midst of our homestudy, painting our front room a VERY cool tomato red that we love, student-parent conferences at school, tutoring, Christmas revelry, blah-blah, you name it. Oh--and working. People still expect us to go to work, if you can believe it. It's been a very busy last month.

Homestudy is going very well...We did our initial homestudy meeting with our social worker together last month in Waltham. Then each of us met with her separately early in both late Nov/early Dec. The hardest part of those meetings was helping somebody to understand our very complex family trees. (Ryan's took a little longer...who'd a thought I'd find someone with an equally interesting and beautifully misshapen tree?) We have our next meeting on Dec 31 in the afternoon.

We also are beginning our "schoolwork" for our homestudy. We're signed up for a class at Wide Horizons for next month, and we have to take a bunch of online courses on both adoptive parenting and international adoption.

Our paperwork is coming nicely. We're getting some papers notarized tomorrow afternoon. Once all our paperwork is in, the social worker can begin constructing a report. Should be a very bizarre read! (How many times in one's life does somebody write your biography for you?)

We've decided to ask for twins/two siblings (we'll see which set fate passes our way)! Very exciting times!

Sorry this blog is a bit dull, but my mind is multitasking to its limit and all creativity seems to have fallen by the wayside! :)

Happy December!

~Katrina