Late night cramming for homestudy appointment #1

I was up until 3:30am last night finishing the paperwork for our first of two homestudy appointments. We left the house at 8am to be in Indianapolis for the appointment at 10am. Kevin completed his essay questions (about self, family, home, and community) during the day while I was at work. We figured he'd get a good night sleep and do all of the driving while I snoozed. And yes, we even found Sedona's vaccination records to submit. Sedona's not a dangerous breed and she'd had her shots, so she's in! We made our final homestudy appointment when the social worker comes to our home for Wednesday, January 24th. I estimate the homestudy will be complete about March 1st.

The homestudy agency did comment that they have a huge amount of couples that are frantically rushing to get their homestudies completed right now to submit their dossier to China before the rules changes go into effect May 1st. Glad that's not me! All of the forms, duplicate copies, notaries, and blood tests including HIV and Hep B are overwhelming enough without worrying about all of this getting done before May 1st or you'll never be able to adopt from China.

Monday night one of my Tri Kappa sorority sisters named Joan told me she visited Taiwan several years ago when her husband was there for a job. Hearing her stories about culture clashes and the traffic were really interesting. She said that she made a huge mistake at a party by complimenting a man on his beautiful watch. Their cultural rules required the man to give her the watch, and he got pretty upset when she was refusing to accept it! Thanks Joan for helping me realize that I really need to buy some more books on Chinese/Taiwanese culture so that I don't mistakenly offend anyone while in Taiwan!