Progress

The coolest part of pregnancy has arrived. I am feeling my baby move! This is by far the earliest I have felt movement. I think with my first two, I was so sick for so long that I couldn't feel the flutters for all the nausea and vomiting. Now, at only 16 weeks, I am definitely feeling this one! What was really cool is that I went in for another (yes, another) sonogram today since my mom is training two new nurses to do ultrasound at the crisis pregnancy center she works at. They needed 47 women to sign up to come in for sonograms to help train the new nurses, so of course I went in to do my part. Anyway, the man who was there doing the bulk of the training instruction did the measurements once, and then he stepped back to allow the first nurse come over and do the same thing. I thought I felt a lot of movement, but still it is not strong yet so I kind of doubted myself. But then the first nurse started and he was in a totally different position! At one point, it really seemed like he was saying, "I want to sleep, but you people keep poking me. So I am going to move as far away from you every time you try to look." It was so cool because since he got so active and I was watching him at the same time, I was able to know for sure that what I was feeling was movement for sure! How fun!

On the adoption front, I mailed in my home study application today. I was amazed at just how much information was necessary for this! For those of you who are not familiar with the home study process, here is a summary of everything I mailed in today. First was the basic stuff: names, birth dates, driver's license numbers, social security numbers, height, weight...address, phone number, where we have lived for the last 10 years. Next we had to submit a sketch of our home with each room labeled with their dimensions and what they are used for along with a photo of our yard. Next is employment information and work history. We provided our marriage history, which is short since we have no previous marriages to report. We had three people fill our references for us. Then came all the questions: six about our character/religion/what we like to do as a family, three about our health, and twenty-seven about the child we want to adopt/our expectations about adoption/our expectations for our adopted child. Then we provided our life insurance information, health insurance information, adoption readiness information, plans for guardianship should something happen to us, a complete financial disclosure including our monthly budgets for various necessities, and our signatures allowing them to look into our past records. That is all in the main application. Attached to that, we included requests for criminal background checks, a four page typed autobiography for each of us, a portion of our last tax return, and a hefty check! :) In addition, we are still gathering some information to give them when they come to the house for the first time. This includes: a marriage certificate, birth certificates, copies of driver's licenses (I guess we could have done that already...), proof of employment, an notarized physical examination forms. We also are going to get fingerprinted on Thursday and mailing in fingerprints with a request for our personal criminal history from the Texas Department of Public Safety. The home study agency will arrange to come out to our house twice and then based off of the information we give them in those visits and what we mailed to them, they will write a report recommending or not recommending that we should adopt that will go to immigration!

Well, if you ever wondered what was involved in a home study, now you know! If you never wanted to know, you should have stopped reading a long, long time ago! :)

One of these days I am going to have to post something not baby related...it will happen...one of these days.