Our homestudy report is almost done!

The social worker called last night with a few follow-up questions (how much experience have you and Brian had with kids? Are you on any regular medications? How old was Brian when Phil adopted him? etc.) and said her goal was to have our homestudy report first draft done by the end of the weekend! Yeah! If all goes well my fingers are crossed to be able to submit our I600A paperwork to the US federal government sometime during the week!

I also talked with our adoption consultant from CHI, our adoption agency. We have some basic registration documents for Russia that we can be working on, so we're going to crank through as much of that as possible. Apparently when the homestudy report is finalized and our registration paperwork is done that gets send to our agency staff in Russia, who assign us a region based on our information in those documents. Then we gather region-specific paperwork.

I also had an e-mail from the manager of the locally owned children's toy, book and gift store where I used to be the manager; I'm going to start picking up some hours there on evenings and weekends to earn a little bit of extra dough. For now I'll be working about 4 hours one evening a week, then we'll pick up the pace in October and then probably more in November and December as the holiday season kicks into gear. I'm excited about being part of the Learning Tree family again, even if it's just for a few hours a week!

I'll let you know how paperwork goes this weekend! We're also going to try to do some of our DVD "learning" required by our agency. You watch DVDs and then go online to take tests.

Oh, and we have a new foster dog. Because the local greyhound racetrack is closing (a good thing in many, many respects) our adoption group, Kansas City Retired Greyhounds as Pets (REGAP) has a number of dogs to get into foster and into our kennel - we're the group working with the track program to find homes for all of the dogs from the track. Check out the REGAP website for more information - greyhounds make wonderful pets, as my earlier posts show! Blast is a sweet fawn boy who had no problems last night (except for one accident in the house - hooray for the hardwood floors) and is doing exceptionally well today. Killian and Guinness always get their noses out of joint for a day and then adjust to the new friend in the house famously! I'll try to post a picture of him soon. Right now he's curled on a dog bed at Brian's feet.