The initial visit...

I am up super early. I hoover every nook and cranny of the house, in fact I will admit, I even hoover the dogs! LRUN is nervous I can tell but he's trying to act cool. I re-boil the kettle several times and re-arrange the cookies......obsessively artistically.

She arrives and we instantly warm to her. I offer my squeaky clean kitchen table but she says she would prefer the lounge. I am sure she sees the panic in my eyes as I hadn't quite cleaned that part of the house as well. Oh well...She has a cuppa but declines my biscuits. I will admit, I am dissapointed in her. I eat the biscuits.They're good.

We talk and talk. She's here for about 3 hours. We talk about us, our childhoods, why we want to adopt, our lifestyle, how our lives will change. She talks about the system, how it works, their rules..which include no smoking and no unprotected sex (hee hee..feel like I am young again!)

She mentions that the next prep course is coming up next month and they might have a space for us. This would be so so super amazing but we don't want to get our hopes us as she explains that the deadline is tight. She has a few concerns about our lives abroad when we lived on sailing yachts and how they were going to get around the neccesary paperwork but we will have to work around it. Also, I am from South Africa which adds further paperwork nightmares but nothing we cannot handle or Fedex over. She has a quick look around the house and seems happy with it. One would hope so....I love our house. It's the perfect family home. We wave goodbye and close the door and both let our enormous sighs (well my LRUN passess wind but let's not go there...something about it was a long time to hold it all in!) We stand and hug each other...tightly. I hold my nose.