Funny Story From The Caseworker Visit

Can you believe our new little girl has been home for 3 months already?

At what point do I have to stop calling her "new"?

Want to hear a funny story about our 3 month post-placement caseworker home visit?

As I mentioned here, supposedly this visit was very low-key, nothing to stress about.  Still, the house was clean (or so I thought), the kids were dressed cute, and Little Girl's hair was neatly braided (because somehow I felt that screamed, "I'm obviously a good mother!").  And when the caseworker arrived I quickly got the children settled playing with playdough at the kitchen table, so they were close enough to keep an eye on, but we could visit in the living room.  And they actually all four played nicely for the 40 minute visit!!!

Okay, so what's funny?

Well, just at the exact moment I though maybe we had it all together, I noticed it.

A curious, suspicious looking, small, brownish, black thing on our leather ottoman, right smack in front of where our caseworker was sitting.  In my mind I thought maybe it was a remnant of something the dog had chewed up, or a stray dry bean from the sensory tub I get out for Little Girl to play with sometimes.  So, I leaned forward and casually picked it up while continuing to converse with the caseworker.

As soon as it was in my hand, I realized it was not a chewed bit of plastic toy or a dried bean, it was a dead bug!

A rather large beetle!

Just the night before, my husband had noticed that Jupiter and Venus were particularly bright and visible in the sky from our house.  He woke up our 2 oldest kids so they could see it.  As he carried them outside, they left the front door opened.  A huge bug flew in, and I couldn't catch it.

But there it was in all it's dead bug glory right in front of the caseworker the next morning!

So, then I had the awkward moment of, "Okay, now I'm sitting here with a dead bug in my hand.  Did she see the bug?  Does she now know I'm sitting here holding a dead bug?  Is she stifling laughter?  Are the notes she's taking on that legal pad about our new daughter's adjustment or mostly just a write-up on our obviously bug-infested house?"

I did get up and casually throw the bug in the trash as if nothing was strange.  Even though typically I don't even pick up dead bugs with a paper towel between my hand and the bug because I think it's too gross to be that close to a bug.  All my children know how I handle bugs -- I get the hand vacuum and suck them up!

I have no idea what the case worker thought of us, will probably never know.  Thankfully, in my years of mothering what are now 4 children, not much really embarrasses me anymore.  My husband and I closed the door and cracked up laughing!

She's been home 3 months.  It's chaos, but it was chaos before.  It will probably always be chaos.  No matter how hard we try, we can't pull off normal.

But, the six of us?

Are a family.

And there isn't anything normal about how that came to be.

Knit together by God alone!

Normal is overrated!

What?  Yes, actually, that blurry, smudged pictures is the best photo I currently have of the 6 of us!

"I want just one normal family photo of the 6 of us," I've told my husband many times these last 3 months!  Perhaps I'm asking for too much.

Find more Thankful Thursday here.