All Exhausting Things Finally Come to an End

I feel like I just ran a marathon... the home study is finished. Well, so close it doesn't count. I've got to pick up one last form from the Police Station this week and fax it in, but otherwise, it's over. We sent our home study application in on October 6th, heard back two days later, and officially started the paperwork on October 11th. We did all three visits within ten days. I never imagined it would go this fast. It has been an absolute whirlwind. I'm incredibly thankful I have a semi-flexible job that allows me to take off work with little notice as I've been all over the place with doctor's appointments, fingerprinting requests, background checks, not to mention the home inspection was Saturday, so Friday was a deep clean/organize kind of day. Thankfully, she wasn't one to check in drawers or under beds.

October passed in an absolute blur. I barely acknowledged the birthdays this month (mine, my mom's, and my husband's). I think Everest was brushed for the first time all month on Friday so the home study inspector didn't find some correlation between tangled cat hair and bad future parent. I have been super neglectful of a lot of things all month, but we've been in overdrive. Now that it's over, I'm obviously completely exhausted. If it gives you any indication, Sam and I got home from our annual camping trip with our friends on Sunday and promptly took a two hour nap (heaven). Sam then proceeded to go to bed for the night at eight o'clock and slept until six this morning. We are beat. October is typically my favorite month of the year, but I'm strangely looking forward to November and a change of pace. Daylight Savings Time ends this weekend, and I am pumped! A- I need some incentive to get up in the morning, and a pitch black bedroom is not one of them, and B- an excuse to go to bed at eight o'clock every night sounds marvelous right about now.

We do still have our profile book to complete, so the stress isn't truly over, but it's waaaaayyy less stressful than the home study. And once it's completed an off to the printer, we're basically done. I'm sure there will still be things to do, but nothing like the last few weeks. I guess that's one great thing about rushing through the home study at warp speed, now that it's over, the hard part is definitely behind us. We're about to enter the period of active waiting, which I should be dreading, as patience is still not my virtue, but really, I'm looking forward to it. Essentially, once we send our home study and profile book off, we'll simply wait. It's a different sort of waiting than a lot of prospective adoptive parents go through, though. In our scenario, we won't get presented to birth mother's unless we but our names forward, which allows us to review the situation ahead of time. As an example, we've seen a few cases with predicted costs as high as $49,000... we won't be putting our names forward for those scenarios. The bad part about this setup is that we will know every time we are presented to a birth mother (and subsequently every time we are not picked)... I'm kind of dreading that part. I know I shouldn't take it personally, but I have a feeling the first time it happens, it's going to feel like a kick to the stomach.

So that's about all of the update I have in me today. I'm hoping to finalize the profile book this week, and maybe, just maybe send it to the printer this weekend. After that, we'll start working on the puzzle. So consider this an open invitation to come over to my house if you enjoy puzzles. When I designed the puzzle, I failed to think through our many colors puzzles typically have... ours is a bit monochromatic, which I'm assuming will make this endeavor SUPER fun.

1000 pieces to this bad boy... I've already claimed the red.
Sam gets the brown. : )

This post feels scattered and disorganized, but I'm too tired to start over. So I'll just end by reminding everyone that Caroline's Stella Dot trunk show is still open for a few more days. Caroline has been extremely sweet to offer this fundraising project, so if you want in on the action, you have until the end of  THIS Friday.