we've been studied

I see that my dog (?) already shared his thoughts on the homestudy (we always knew EJ was special), but thought I'd add a few words...

So, yes, the homestudy was yesterday. I think overall it went very well. The only downside was that after all our cleaning, the social worker barely checked out our sparkling clean apartment! Anyhow, even though it lasted almost three hours, it went by really quickly, and there was nothing that really surprised us or caught us off-guard. And EJ was on his best behavior (thanks to a really good new bone).

It is definitely a milestone - although there is still a lot (A LOT) of waiting ahead of us, we have largely completed the paperwork involved in the adoption process, and completion of the homestudy will enable us to proceed with the final steps (agency and DHS/CIS approvals and ultimately submission of our file to Ethiopia). Up until recently, the idea that we would one day bring home a child seemed like something so far off, something we talked about over and over, but was too far in the future to really plan for. We are starting to realize that this future is not quite so distant.

One more note - we owe our friends and family many, many (belated) thank-yous for taking the time to write such kind words about us and providing references for us. We feel really lucky to have such wonderful people in our lives.