Baby Steps

A little progress this week!   After a couple of weeks of just waiting and not much going on, we have made a little progress this week!  We have sent off for our passports and are hoping to have them back in four to six weeks.  We have a little bit of trepidation about this because apparently the laws changed in 2011 and they want your parent's full names on your birth certificates.  Idaho...back in my day, didn't put the full middle name, just the middle initial.  Getting this changed is a MAJOR project and the lady at the records department acted like that was complete new information to her and said that they had no thad any influx of  people needing their certificates revised...so, we took a risk and just used the original, here is hoping we don't  have to go back and redo everything!

We also had our first home study meeting this week!  We met our social worker in Corinth at Subway...Chris is totally accusing me of making the plans because I am the only one in the house that truly appreciates the deliciousness of a good Veggie sub...or any other sub for that matter.  Anyway, I had nothing to do with it...but I didn't complain!  :)  I totally meant to take pictures, but I guess nerves got the best of me and I forgot.  The meeting went well.  We met our social worker in person for the first time and she is a little bitty, sweet, talker!  We talked for about 2 1/2 hours and it was not at all nerve wracking, more like just talking to an old friend!  Our next visit will probably be our home visit...would love that to be next week but we haven't heard back from her yet so not sure about that yet.

Thursday we  got our local fingerprinting done...that will probably take the longest and, in hindsight, we wish we would have gotten on that a little earlier because that will probably take several weeks and our home study can't be completed without them...live and learn!  We talked to a very sweet lady who did the fingerprinting AND we will soon know if Brooks has a criminal past we don't know about!  (I kid!)

Finally, we got our well tested.  We had no idea you were supposed to get your well water tested (apparently once a year....ours was last tested in 2001)!  We got the results back today and we have no bacteria...but we do have high levels of chloroform...REALLY, chloroform...I had no idea.  ***Update, Chris just called with a revision of this report, he misread and we do NOT have chloroform...we have coliform, which is totally normal and harmless!  Makes me think back to a certain court case I was obsessed with this summer, but I digress.  Anyway, we now have to use some bleach to treat the water and retest in 7-10 days, simple enough I guess...except for the whole no access to water for bathing, drinking, cooking, etc.

We are now, once again just at a waiting point.  Hopefully we will talk to the social worker today to get our next meeting scheduled and get our education set up.

Please pray that my passport application will be accepted, that we can get our water up to standard and that we can continue to keep things moving along.  We are still committed to getting everything on our end in as quickly as possible.  We also talked to our stateside representative for the orphanage and they have received all of our "stuff" so they are just waiting for our completed home study to proceed!  Every day brings us a little closer to our sweet girl!  Thanks for the prayers!