We had our second (and last non-home-visit) home study meeting today. Phew - it's glad to have that behind us. The meeting itself went fine but getting there was a royal PITA. My friend who agreed to watch our kids got the flu this week so we had to hit up another friend who gratiously agreed but lived over an hour away from us. Our appointment was at 9am. We had to leave at 7:30am, with kids in tow, but traffic kept us from reaching my friend's house until 9am! :-( Thankfully we made it to the visit by 9:20 but, suffice it to say, it's been a long day of being in the car. DH had to make arrangments to get two of his kids on the bus and his Kindergartener needed to stay at school a few minutes because we didn't make it home in time for him to take the bus home. Yikes!

The kids will be excited to learn that they get to stay home from school for the morning for our home visit.

The bad news is that we can't get squeezed in for the home visit until the end of February :-( Blah. I was hoping the home study would be done next week. Oh well - best laid plans.

Our SW wants us to hold onto our I-600a to turn it all in with our home study approval. Things here at BCIS are NOT going well. The whole office moved and the staff changed hands in the last six months and they implented new policy (no fingerprinting until after home study is received) and apparently things are totally disorganized and chaotic. So I don't get to cross that off my list after all and won't get to until beg. March. Now we are looking to be DTV by June - that seems so far away. Maybe we'll get a referral right away and be ready to travel by fall :-) One can hope!

I'm keeping busy by painting like a maniac. This is the wall I painted yesterday. I still need to stencil some chinese characters on the wall around the clock, I think, in some subdued color. Or maybe we won't. This weekend we are painting one of the kids' rooms - this time bright colors, not dark. It will be way easier, I think! Anyway, I always ALWAYS wanted a purple wall. Now we have one :-) My oldest son said "Wow, not it feels like home and not just a new construction house!!" ;-)