we keep it real y'all...

you know those families that hold hands all the time, finish each other's sentences, "never argue" and say, "no, you hang up first" "no, you!" "haha, no, you hang up first!" post pictures of elaborate homemade meals for nightly dinners and so on...yeah, that's not us.

we do things like eat snacks for dinner sometimes (like when we want to go to bed at 7...):

we also think 10 minutes before our sw arrives to our home for our final home study visit is a great time to get in an...um...disagreement. 

she's cool with that though, we laughed and told her about it later, just so she would know we were real.  

--see, there's a bunch of official what-not paperwork and official seals, and official authentifications and official blahs that have to be done. it's too stressful to think of the real terms for all that, much less do it yourself. agencies know this-which is why they offer to get all that what-not officialed and authenthified for you for an additional $2,000 (on the state/county level); and then theres more official blahs that have to be done on the country levels, and they will do that for you for $1,200.  i told ryan we could sell one of my kidneys, donate plasma, and sell his cat (not mine, mine is awesome, his we can do without) to pay for this, but he disagreed. i disagreed back and showed him some priceless family heirlooms we could sell to pay for it, and he disagreed with my disagreement...so on. (some of this may be hyperbole).  

anyhow, we showed our sw our home, the fire extinguishers, the smoke alarms, the carbon monoxide (or is it dioxide...) alarms, and our embarrassing ebay/junk room (which is NOT lu-lu's room). we then showed her our sweet girl's  perfect room. by this time, she hadn't ended the meeting early, so we felt pretty confident she thinks we can be entrusted to be lu-lu's mommy and daddy, even with a messy ebay room. 

what's next?

a bunch more papery stuff:

* we wait for her to type up her report, send it to us for review, and such. 

* then she submits it to the government and we then submit our i-800 application. ($720)

* once the gov. gets this and does their thing (who knows how long this will take, they have more important things to do, like mislead all of us...), we get our fingerprinting appt.  it's like x-men level/biometric super fingerprinting. ($85 a person)...(they better be able to tell me things i don't even know about myself for it to cost that much a person) (can't i just use the ink pads in my classroom's stamp box and do it myself?)

this doofus is pretty excited to meet lu-lu too. he's taking obedience classes and everything!

(ohmygoodness, no one ever told me how much work puppies were! why didn't anyone tell me! what are you people thinking who know the truth about puppies and get a puppy and pop out a baby the old fashioned way at the same time!)

anyhow, our fsp profile is officially on the "compiling dossier" page with rr now. woot! 

and there's over $100 in it! that's some beautiful love for our sweet girl! 

i'm trying to drink lots of water for now, just in case it comes down to ousting a kidney.