Homestudy and interviews, check.

Funny thing an interview. It is someone's job to identify really personal and important information about you in about an hour. Just asking me my favorite food could take that long. How could I possibly expect her to get it all down in about an hour?

Well, we tried. Our individual interviews went well this morning, or so we think. What do we know? We just put it all out there and hope they'll pick up the pieces and fit a nice puzzle together. We were reminded often that this puzzle becomes the permanent public record on the two of us and our background. This was the last of the process required by the state (other than weekends of training). Drug use, alcohol and other forms of abusive circumstances in our past were questioned and put to rest.

The bulk of the discussion was about our families and our relationship with everyone in them. Josh's fit neatly into the paper that comes with the agency's paperwork from the state. Tiffany's took extra sheets. All of Tiffany's families got credit for finally finding a match and sticking with them for 30+ years. She ended with Marty and when Tiffany said he was the youngest of 9, that was enough. No questions about which of his siblings has how many kids there. We think that wore her out.

Interestingly, her purpose with this exercise was to learn who has taught us how to be a wife, husband, mother, father, family member. What relationships were we exposed to that gave us a thread of hope to journey into this unknown? My brief answer would be all of the ones we talked about and the rest of them that we didn't have time to cover. It leads to a lot of thinking about just how we grew to be these particular people.

Relationships are funny. Who each of my family members was for me at age 9 was drastically changed by age 29. To ask me in an hour what are some characteristics of each person in my family and how they relate to me opens a HUGE box of memories and I don't know that I captured any of them well enough. I did get the sense that she had confidence that we were all open and adaptable to change. In the end, that's what she said she was looking for.

A Change is Gonna Come.... (sam cooke)