pronoia: Visit #1

She got to our house precisely on time, which is a skill I envy in people. The dogs were, predictably, not happy about being confined when there was someone new to love in the house, and they whined and woofed until we let them out to say hello. Social Worker (SW) was charming and straightforward and interested in all of the strange details of our life: Ms. P's time in the convent, the flowers and firebreather at our wedding, our combined experience that renders most of the potential risk factors in infants (drug exposure, HIV exposure, disability, prematurity) less scary to us than they are to most people. She walked around the house to know what it looked like, and while I noticed every single cobweb we hadn't managed to vacuum down, she didn't even mention the dog-made cat door.

The visit was some combination of gratifying, anti-climactic, comfortable, and anxiety-producing. I mean, we thought about our answers -- it wasn't a situation in which we were comfortable blurting. But at the same time, it highlighted for us just how prepared we are. It's not that there will be no conflicts, it's not that parenting won't stretch us and challenge us and distress us at times, but we've thought and talked about things like discipline, about ways of interacting with kids, about what is important to us and not important to us, what hills we want to die on. We've thought a lot about openness, about the importance of an open stance while maintaining flexibility around contact. As Ms. P summed it up later, we might be hard to place (what with our orientation, Ms. P's weight and mental illness, our religion), but we're likely to be beloved of the agency.

If nothing else, we've crossed another thing off the list. Now we have to finish our paperwork -- the driving records from two states, the doctor's forms, the fire safety inspection, the statement of net worth -- so we can move on to the more interesting interviews and visits.

Thank you to everyone who helped talk me down out of my tree beforehand!