Because I know you’ve all by dying to know how getting our home ready for the foster licensing has been going, today you’re getting an update.

We’ve made progress. I’m not certain anyone besides us can tell exactly how much progress we’ve made because the house, the downstairs and baby’s room, especially, is still a disaster. I think our basement isn’t currently fire safe because we have so many boxes stacked in passageways that it would be really hard to get out of the basement in case of fire.

However, a lot of stuff has moved to the attic. We’ve decided to put family pictures in the cedar chest, and it’s now in place. Extraneous mattresses are gone. In fact, the finished room is a lot emptier than it used to be, though the boxes that remain are mostly junk boxes that we may or may not go through right now. (We’ve gone through a lot of junk boxes already.) We have a few more things to go in the attic, and then we’re really down to organizing.

We have a locking cabinet that’s ready to be put up upstairs in which we can lock away all medications and vitamins. We have one more bookshelf for the basement that needs to go up and books we’re keeping can move out of boxes and bins.

We have a few more runs to Half Price Books and Value village to sell/donate items, but we’re actually close, really close.

Sadly, we had hoped to do more over the last week, but C hurt his back when we were in Portland in a fall. Then I pulled a muscle in my back on Saturday that led to us pretty much doing nothing on Monday. (Sunday we had a bbq with one of C’s classmates, his wife, and their baby.) Then on Tuesday evening, C started coming down with a bad cold/sinus infection. It’s moved really fast and yesterday he was on the head exploding part and today he’s on the losing his voice part.

My back was getting better, but last night I had a major muscle spasm. (It’s feeling much better right now, though.)

Still, we’re hoping one or two more productive weekends and we’re ready for the inspection. We’ve got a few more things to buy- a couple door knobs for the closets so they match the other new ones we’ve installed, the latches for drawers and cupboards to make them “childproof”, and maybe even a new fridge. (If the locking cabinet is big enough to hold some dishes as well, we can get rid of the cabinet above the current fridge and finally have a space tall enough for the full sized refrigerator we’ve both wanted since we moved in.)

We have decided that to reward ourselves for passing the foster license home inspection, we will take a trip to Goldendale, WA, where they have a really cool observatory and a replica Stonehenge.

So that’s where we are- close, getting closer, at least for the foster home license. We still have to pass FBI background checks (waiting to be contacted to go in for finger printing) and then we have to put together some more documents for the social workers, but we’re getting there. Or at least, getting to the part where there’s nothing more we can do but wait, and maybe work on decluttering more of the house.