24th of March and we got our home visit done!
We love our sweet home but, honestly, we can get quite messy, here!
So we cleaned, and decorated for one week, and since spring is here we even got some plants.

Our new kitchen plants enjoying the view of Brooklyn... the basil looks great! :)

The studio, with our collection of picture books

Bedroom's plants, enjoying the view of Manhattan

  (I don't know why, but I don't have picture of the dining room!)

We discovered soon that we probably went above and beyond, and many of the precautions we took were not necessary:

Bars and protections at the widows = unnecessary
Smoke detectors and CO2 detectors = necessary
Locker for medicines =  necessary
Baby proofed cabinets (for soaps, detergents and other chemical products)  = unnecessary (she said we didn't need it right now, but only in the future)
The crazy cleaning = waaay unnecessary! (but now the house feels so pretty!).

Next step: the social worker will send us a copy of her home study, then she will file it to the director of the adoption agency... and then all the paper work aspect will be over (for a while, al least!).

The last thing to do before going online are the brochures, the Dear Birthmother Letter.
We are STILL working on our DBL, the text is done and approved by the agency (they had to cut so much, we realized how hard it is to describe honestly yourself, you relationship, your family, your hopes, and dreams...  in only 950 words!). We are still picking pictures and templates... and a part of me feel uncomfortable and  embarrassed, since it really looks like we have to  sell and promote ourselves, the same way you would do it for a car sale or a property (I was and I will never be good at it!). On the other hand the DBL is the only way a Birth Mom can get a glimpse of the prospective adoptive parents...  So we better get through, and try to be as honest as possible...

 We don't want to be overstressed by deadlines, we don't want to run, we are taking our time to go through this process and probably many people will do it way faster than us... but my wish is to be online by the middle of May.

There, I wrote it!
Now let's see what will happen!

Alice