We passed! I didn’t have any doubts because we can fake acting normal pretty well when we have to. LOL.

There was only mild lying. More sins of omission than outright lies. I am very proud that I managed to keep a straight face as the husband described his brother at various times as “unemployed, independant, and not much for keeping in touch” instead of absolutely factually as a paranoid schizophrenic who keeps running away from his group homes and living on the streets. Also when she asked about religion I took his long winded explanation of how he was a disappointment to his preacher father by not attending church to be my cue to keep my pagan mouth shut.

One disturbing thing was that the woman did not seem to approve of our adoption plans. She was a former foster care worker but was strongly advocating against adopting from the foster care system. She was pushing us strongly to infant adoption. I finally said that 3 years old was my absolute minimum and she seemed shocked by my certainty. I explained that I don’t want an infant. I don’t like infants. If I wanted an infant I wouldn’t adopt. If it came down to a choice of infant or no kid I’d pick no kid. Ok, maybe I wasn’t that explicit but I got the point across. Then she said that if we were insistant on 3-6 years old we should go international. That was the plan for many years but after lots of research we decided against it mostly because of cost. I don’t think she realized she was dealing with a person who has been researching her options for 8 years. I knew she wouldn’t sway me but I was concerned that she would put doubt in the husband’s mind. Basically she was saying that kids that age are only available if they are so messed up that no one wants them. We will be committing ourselves to a lifetime of driving them to therapy at the best if we insist of adopting out of foster care. We realize there may be problems but that’s ok.

Then she seemed quite surprised when we said that she didn’t need to put down “Caucausian prefered”. Since our first thought was international why would we care about having the same race in domestic?

Other than that she was nice. No animals made a nuisance of themselves.