In the middle...

It's been about a month since we decided to adopt and we are now swimming around in a pond of home study tasks.  Here are a few of the highlights:

• Caolon and I each writing our autobiographies - mine was 5 pages, his was 2.  Lol.
• Signing off on multiple background checks to prove that we aren't creepers or abusers.
• Waiting for our doctor visit to find out once and for all if we have tuberculous or HIV.
• The 78 questionairre (that we each had to complete) covering every angle of our lives and plans for raising children - some of my favorite questions were:
• What would ever cause you to give up on a child? (To which I wanted to respond, "well  I haven't yet," thinking about my 8th graders who sometimes really push the limits.)
• Which of the following scenarious would result in you beating a child?  (To which I wanted to respond, "well, I haven't yet," as well!)
• How do you plan to teach your child about sex? (To which I had no response.  Literally.  Caolon will have to do that part!)
• Taking inventory of  our house to determine how much personal property we own to count among our assets (surprisingly more than I figured).
• Working through courses about adopting children from China to meet our 12 hours of training that we are supposed to complete - so far we've learned:
• About the challenges of adopting older children (which includes 2-year-olds, which we may well get).
• The History of China (I can now tell you that Sun Yat-sen, the man whose quote I have on my classroom wall, was the president and founder of The People's Republic of China, which was a good plan, except that China had been a feudalistic country up until that point, so the Republic didn't really work, which is why civil war broke out and Mao Tse-tung rose to power - wow, that reads like an 8th grade book report!).
• A little bit about the language and customs of China.
• Deciding that we are going to leave the gender of our child up to God and the placement agency.  We said we'd be happy with either and to just surprise us.

We have a lot more to accomplish, but I feel like we have really done quite a bit in just one short month!