paperwork.

paperwork.

yep. it's one of the things that deter people from adopting. everybody makes it sound terrible. and i'm not going to lie, there's alot of it. and there are a ton of questions that are hard. things like:

what is your first childhood memory?

describe your relationship with your parents and their personalities?

what reoccurring dream do you have?

what are your greatest strengths?

what are your greatest weaknesses?

i felt like i was auditioning for something, but i didn't know what the right answers were. there were things that we had learned to be vague about--like our discipline philosophy. the challenge for me was not to share more than i needed to. not to overanalyze. to just answer the stinking questions.

another challenge was making time. julia was 2. abby was 5. i was homeschooling for the first time. i was TIRED. when i did have down time, i didn't want to sit and fill out paperwork. i wanted to chill. so yeah, the paperwork took a long long time.

and then there was helping jon to answer his questionnaires. we found that if we sat and discussed the questions and i typed his answers, it went alot faster for him. one road trip, we got one whole section of questions done. such VICTORY!

probably the hardest paperwork for us though was the type of child desired forms. i'll talk about that more later. it deserves a post of its own.

then there is paperwork that is just tedious. doctor's visits for physicals. bank statements that have to be notarized. hoops to jump through. those didn't bother me as much. i like checking things off. so, it was just a matter of doing it. we were done with all of our paperwork by early spring of 2010. all that was left before we waited for our child was the homestudy interviews. the final hurdle!!