I've been feeling pretty miserable with a bad cold lately, so I haven't been up to writing. I still am not feeling that great, but since there is a lot to write about, I'll try to bear my headache and coughing and type away.

Saturday my husband and I went to the adoption conference. It was a long day. We attended four sessions that were 1 � hours each. One was on psychological issues that adopted children face. Another was on transracial adoption. These were more informational sessions, and they kind of reminded me of going back to school again. The other two sessions were about how birthmothers make adoption plans and about open adoption. These two sessions had panels of adoption case workers, birthmothers and birthgrandparents, and adoptive parents.

The major thing we got out of the conference was that the ideas we had about what situations we were comfortable with concerning adoption are really the right ones. We are now more confident about our adoption plan.

We had lunch with our case worker and her teenage daughter. We also sat at the table with another couple in the process of adopting an 11 year old girl and with a mother and her adopted teenage son. We all had a nice conversation with eachother. There were a few other couples adopting from our local agency that attended. We didn't see any of the couples that attended the first information meeting with us. I did spot a couple from our agency whose profile I have seen online.

My husband completed his self study yesterday. Last night we completed the last couple pieces of paperwork we needed before our individual interviews. Today I stopped at the agency on my way home from school and dropped them off. Before I left school I sneaked a little look at my husband's self study, and ended up reading the whole thing. I was surprised about how much alike our answers were. A couple of the questions we had discussed together, but there were some other questions where our answers were almost word for word. It was really eerie when I read the sentence where we described the qualities we wanted to instill in our children. We both wrote "polite, honest, and hardworking" in the same order. The only difference was that in my sentence I also inserted the word "kind".

An hour after I stopped by the agency, our case worker called. She asked if my husband had dropped off the papers. I said I had, and she told me I should have stopped in to talk. I said I didn't realize she was there. Actually I really didn't know if it was appropriate to ask to see her. I figured she would be busy or not even there. I guess she wanted me to know that I could feel free to stop by and chat without an appointment. That's pretty nice of her. Anyway, she said we could schedule our individual interviews for next week. I scheduled them for next week Thursday, October 18. My hubby's is first thing in the morning, and mine will be right after school is out.

I'm pleased that things are moving along so quickly. I originally thought we wouldn't get approved until February. Now I'm confident that we can be done before Christmas. Now I need to get more serious about putting together our profile. During the last week I've been gathering pictures. Now I need to figure out which ones to use and what I'm missing. I cancelled my brother's photography session last night because I was just not feeling well. We'll have to try again another time. I did fool around with my camera though when I felt a little sick of just lying around knitting. I decided to take pictures of myself knitting my shawl. It was a little tricky, but after about ten shots I was able to get a couple good ones that looked pretty natural. It's hard to do when you only have ten seconds to get yourself settled!