Homestudy: a step forward and a moment to pause

Our social worker, who I loved thank goodness, came to our home yesterday for our homestudy.  It went really well and was much less stressful than I anticipated.  (On a quick side note: I do believe in spiritual warfare and I do believe that the stomach virus and bout of vomiting I had the night before was from the devil himself.  He was not allowed to sabotage the homestudy and it went on).  The social worker looked around our home, wrote notes about where the baby will sleep, made sure we had fire extinguishers and spent about two hours interviewing us.  When she walked in the house the kids greeted her with smiles.  When she asked their names Brooks slyly said "my name B-ster Boo".  To which I quickly looked at Brad and said, "We really need to teach him his real name."  The social worker interviewed Kyrie separately to ask her age appropriate questions about our home life.  We were in the other room the whole time but did hear Kyrie tell the social worker that she really wants a baby sister but Brooks doesn't because he's "a boy".  I actually think that part is true.  Brooks might have a really hard time with this.  He loves being the baby of the family. 

After the social worker left we started talking about all of the paper work we still have to fill out for the homestudy (medical exams for all, pet vaccine records which means actually taking the cats to the vet, and letters of recommendation).  In addition to that we have to pay our remaining homestudy fees.  We also just sent 50 more pages of forms to the adoption agency and owe them another large amount of money.  As we were talking we decided finishing the homestudy is our priority.  That has to be finished for us to apply for grants or low interest loans.  So at this point we are going to push pause on the agency moving our paperwork forward to the dossier process.  We will finish our homestudy and apply for financial help then move forward.  I think that since we haven't yet been matched or seen our child's face it makes this decision easier.  It should only set us back 3-4 weeks but, in the adoption world 3-4 weeks seems like a long time.