Home study blathering ...

Our stimulus check arrived yesterday. Yay!

That puts us at having just over 1/2 of the fee for the home study.

Now I just need my wedding dress to sell. If it does, we'll be oh so close to the mark and I'll be able to easily close the gap.

The closer we get, the more excited I get. The more real it seems.

So much so that I've even allowed myself to look at the baby items section of craigslist and wondering when it would be appropriate to make my family throw us a baby shower (heifer's getting a baby shower, damn it, but more on that later).

That real.

I've also been looking online at some adoption books - mainly those aimed at the child. I want us to be open about our baby being adopted from day one. No surprises to explain when the kid turns 5 or 10 or 15 and discovers he / she is adopted (although it'd be pretty self evident if we do adopt a black or mixed-race baby). There are some pretty good books out there that I'd heard of before, so I wanted to take a closer look at them. I think I'll head over to a real book store and look at them in person, though.

One book I found kind of amusing is a family tree of sorts, but aimed towards the adoption. I'm going to look it up again and see if I can find it locally.

In other news ...

I was cleaning out Hoss's kennel this morning (he's been cooped up a lot with my taking over the back yard for painting) and discovered a well dug trench behind his dog house. He goes back there to get out of the sun, no biggy. But there's now a trench. Not a long trench, though. Not the kind that'd let him sink his entire body. No. This is more like an angled hole. What makes it stranger is that it's where his front 1/2 lays. I know this because I'll sometimes see him peek around the corner if I go outside. So he's laying in this hole with his upper half lower than his bottom half? It doesn't seem like that would be comfortable.

Although it would explain why he was so muddy after the last hard rain.