well, that went well...

So the social worker came on Sunday and she was nice enough to give us two weeks notice before she did our home visit. Which means I had exactly 14 days to give myself an ulcer clean my home. And I tried. I did. But I'm not that good of a housekeeper and, well, let's just say it's a good thing she didn't go beyond the family room.

Anyway, the social worker was very nice. She just asked us a lot of questions about us, about Goober and about our family.

She's going to recommend the adoption at the hearing.

After she left, Nature Boy and I just looked at each other and almost melted with relief.

And I hadn't realized how much Nature Boy had been stressing about this. I knew that I was one big walking ball of anxiety -- my face was breaking out worse than my teenage son's, I had eaten every morsel of chocolate in our county, my mood was swinging like a monkey from a vine. But Nature Boy was cool. He was completely unfazed by the prospect of a woman coming to our home and maybe deciding that we shouldn't have our child. He soothed my crazy and made sure our lives went on as normal as they could.

But then we got the verdict. We were worthy of our child. We could keep on being a family, in her opinion.

He hugged me. I hugged him. We both hugged the Goober, who still doesn't quite understand what's going on, but he understood this was a happy moment and tolerated our unbridled affection with a stoicism that would make Winston Churchill proud.

And the hugging and smiling and laughing went on all day. It was as if an enormous weight had been lifted. We had broken through one more obstacle on the way to becoming a legal family and life is good.