Our Monthy Visit

On Tuesday morning, Henry got up around 7:30AM. I picked him up and took him to my bed for some snuggling. Henry liked that. We had about 15 minutes of exclusive Mommy-Henry time, which was nice. I very rarely get a lot of snuggling time with Henry. He's great with hugs, but snuggling requires staying in one location, which isn't Henry's thing...unless a book is being read to him. Henry declared that he wanted pancakes, waffles, and oatmeal for breakfast. Jeff gave him two out of the three: waffles and oatmeal. I got Miss R out of bed around 8AM. She wasn't excited about getting up, but she didn't protest too much.

The kids were excited to have a visitor, Miss R's adoption caseworker. Henry called her "Miss Christy." The kids were cute while Miss Christy visited. They also decided to shout out "Stupid Eagle!" several times. Jeff and I are, understandably, concerned about appearances and explained that their shouts were a derivation of "Stupid Beagle" from Peanuts (a Snoopy reference). Miss R changed "beagle" to "eagle." Given Jeff's love of the Eagles football team, I of course have not discouraged their use of the phrase "Stupid Eagle!" b/c I think that it is pretty darn funny. Not sure that Jeff does. Miss R also decided to send me to "timeout" during the visit. Not sure what I had done to merit a timeout, but she also told me to "Go away, Mommy!" Now that one, I can explain. Whenever the kids say "Go away!", I proceed to kiss them. Miss R is particularly fond of telling me to "Go away!" and then pretend to be about to run off so that I can catch her and kiss her. Luckily, I think that Christy found the interactions amusing, which is good.

What's left to do to get this adoption done already?
(1) Get certified to adopt (requires A Place To Call Home submitting our paperwork to the adoption judge).
(2) Submit paperwork to Christy. We turned some of the paperwork into her today. But she said that she won't actually do anything with the paperwork until we are "adoption certified." From an agency perspective, I understand why they would wait. No point on acting until they know that people are "approved."
(3) Once certified, Christy will review our application. There are different components of the application. The long part is having the application sent to the Court for approval, which can take 2 months after she sends it along.

I suspect that it would be technically possible to have this done by April (wouldn't it be fun to celebrate Henry's birthday and Miss R's adoption the same month!). But with bureaucracies being what they are, I suspect that June is probably a more likely date. She said that as far as she is concerned based on what she has from CPS, we will be adopting Miss R. That's what our hearts desire. We want to finalize this as soon as possible.

The kids were very cute as they said goodbye to "Miss Christy." They love seeing people to their cars.

Then, it was off to daycare. We dropped Miss R off at her class first. She gave Henry a big hug goodbye and he said "I Love You!" Melts my heart. Then, I dropped off Henry. He was upset about going to school. I wish that he would be more excited about it.