Home Study

Today was the day our social worker Kristen was coming out to spend 3 hours at our home. It was our first time to meet her. All of our correspondence so far has been via email, so I was glad to finally get to meet her.

I went back and forth about how to clean my house for this event.... Do I really clean, so she thinks we are tidy people? I mean, I would hate for her to get out her magnifying glass and white rag and discover all the dust on our baseboards. What if only a quarter inch of dust is acceptable and we have half an inch? Big decisions to be made over here.

So I went with picking up all the "stuff" and lightly cleaning. No scrubbing of the toilets but I did windex the counter tops off. And I did mop the wood floors.... there were the footprints of dusty, barefoot children all over and what appeared to be remnants of when the dog puked on the floor as I was walking out the door and I didn't do a very good job wiping it up. I know, disgusting. But a little dog puke is not going to make me late for dropping off Avery to mother's day out at church....

I digress....

So Kristen came. She interviewed all of us together and then each of us seperately. It was basically the same questions from the form we had already filled out. The usual "what was your childhood like?"..... "what is your parenting style?"......

During Brandon's solo interview, they got to talking about college and he was telling her about how he went to ACU for undergrad. Turns out, she went to ACU also. Not only that, but her brother and Brandon were good friends!!! How crazy is that! Small world!!


During Avery's interview, Kristen asked her what her dad and her do together for fun. The only thing my daughter could come up with was "watch tv." Watch tv?? What about all the campouts he takes her on? What about teaching her to ride bikes? What about taking her swimming? Nope. I wanted to jump in and throw all that out there. But I didn't want her to know I was standing around the corner eavesdropping, so I kept my mouth shut.

After the 3 hour of interviews, she toured the house and we were done. Pretty painless. I think the worst part was when she asked me what my weaknesses are. Why is that such a hard question?? I thought about saying that one of weaknesses is telling my daughter to go turn on the tv and get a pop tart out of the pantry while i roll over and get a few more minutes of sleep. I didn't though. So I went with the ole "I don't tell people 'no' so I end up being on PTA, hosting parties, and countless other things that sound like fun at the moment but then overwhelm me and make me crazy." That sounds good, right?

Ah, one more thing to check off the list. Only 3 more things to do this week. Thank goodness none of them require cleaning or someone coming to my house.