Homestudy Update COMPLETE!!!

Our SW arrived this morning, moments after Mr Messy and Little Prince got home from their Boys Day Out to Toys R Us and McDonalds! We were all in the middle of unpacking (and untwiddling all those nightmare wire fasteners) the Star Wars toys Little Prince had chosen. He got such a FABULOUS school report last week, that this was his treat from Daddy :-) Our SW waited patiently while we sorted out all the boxes and Little Prince happily chatted away to her about his trip with Daddy and his new toys. LMS then took him out to the local Indoor Play Centre, to keep him amused while me and Mr Messy talked to the SW, and Drama Teen tidied her bedroom.

We talked for the next four hours!! We went over in detail, our reasons for changing from China to Ethiopia, our reasons for choosing Ethiopia, our plans to keep our future child in touch with her original language and culture and what, if any, special needs we felt we could cope with. We also had to explain the adoption process in Ethiopia and the likely background of children needing to be placed for adoption. We were amazed at how much we got through! We also had to read through the revisions to the report following the SW's visit last Monday.

We also had to go into great detail about Little Prince's emerging difficulties. Although when shown his glowing school report, and his narrowly focussed IEP (concentrates on fine motor control) she agreed that it is nothing to get worried about and that it shouldn't present any great difficulties to us either now or when our new little one joins our family.

At the end of our visit our SW said she was going to go and type up all the information from today and contact our LA's Team Leader to say the updates are all ready. We all think the Team Leader will want to schedule a meeting between herself and our SW to discuss the report, and our SW says she will want to go over it with a fine tooth comb!! So there could be more work to do, but we won't know until SW and Team Leader have had their meeting. Once everyone is happy that the report is complete and that Panel will be happy with it, we will be assigned a Panel date. Once we have a date to work towards we can then schedule our new medicals and apply for new CRB checks. Our SW agrees that this was done (at our LA's insistance) too early last time and that we shouldn't start those until we have a firm date for Panel.

I am completely amazed and stunned, that that was it!!! Despite our LA's insistance that we have a 'whole new homestudy' our pragmatic and practical SW has done what we asked in the first place - updated our existing report!! We've just got to keep our fingers firmly crossed that the new report satisfies our LA Team Leader and that we get to Panel with a minimum of delays - which given how slowly our LA works would be a minor miracle!!