Nothing Like Expected

Our house has never been this clean, nor will it will ever be this clean again.  For the past week, all we've done is scrub and dust and vacuum and organize and scrape, and our house is utterly gorgeous.  Was it necessary?  Nope.  Our social worker said that everyone cleans, but that's not what concerns them, and the kind of people who ask for a home study aren't usually the kind of people who need to worry terribly what others will think of their home.  While I knew that, really, there's no way I could have gone into the home study any other way.  

Nancy came over last night to start the process.  It only took two hours and was considerably easier than what I expected.  As we've already started our agency application, much of the information she needed was already completed in our profile, and she only needed to ask us questions not covered or ones we hadn't answered yet.  We now must each write a comprehensive autobiography, detailing everything from our childhood impressions of our rearing to our employment history and how we feel about our own roles as parents.  All of this information will then be compiled, along with medical histories and our letters of recommendation, into one profile to be submitted to each state and our agency.  While our personal histories will only comprise about 3/4 of a page, we are free to expound upon our personal virtues and failings as much as we like, to be condensed by Nancy.  I actually feel a little guilty about how much I'll inevitably write.  I mean, what if I leave something out that I find terribly important and that the birth parents will latch onto as the reason for choosing us?  As Nancy said, we have to view the massive volumes of information we provide as it will be viewed by a young woman and, possibly, her mother, grandmother, aunts, siblings, cousins, brothers-in-law, everyone, so we'd better make ourselves as vibrant and transfixing as possible. While I have endless faith in Christian's boundless virtues, I will incessantly worry about my own.

  

So, it's a damn good thing our house is clean.