So...let's talk about your marriage (but sign this first)

Apparently, our marriage the topic of the next meeting with me, Jennifer, and M, our adoption counselor and the woman conducting our home study.

Our first meeting, held last Friday, focused on bringing M up to speed and her going over the huge amounts of paperwork we'll need to provide, among them being:

• written confirmation from the Bristol, RI, police, the RI Attorney General, and the FBI that we are not bad people
• our autobiographies (I'm hoping David McCullough will be available to ghost write mine)
• financial reports, tax records, mortgage details
• 3 letters of reference from friends confirming that we are not bad people
  
• letters from our employers confirming that we are not bad people and that we actually are gainfully employed
• medical reports
• and the list goes on

However, meeting #2 tomorrow is when the fun starts. "Next week, we'll talk about your marriage," M says to us as we're wrapping up our first meeting. Of course, she gives us no clue as to exactly what we'll be talking about when it comes to our marriage so imaginations have run wild over the last 5 days as to the potential questions.

Once we get through that gauntlet, we'll have at least 2-3 more meetings with her, host M during a visit to our home, and then take part in an additional 10 hours of parenting education. And this is just for the home study. We aren't even talking about the next step of working with the placement agency to get out there as adoptive parents and hopefully be selected by a birth mother!

Seriously, China would not have to worry about overpopulation if they required everyone to go through this process before having a biological child. There's more paperwork than when we bought our house, though as I noted on my Facebook page the evening after our first meeting, "Of course, you can always sell your home. Kids are forever and appear to result in a correspondingly larger amount of things to be signed."