First homestudy visit

I realized I haven't done a personal post in a while.

We had our first homestudy visit yesterday. I thought it was going to last 3 hours but it was actually more like 45 minutes. I was slammed at work, and I needed to rush out the door early to get home in time for the appointment. I made it there just in time, but snapped at my husband because our little dog wasn't there to greet me at the door.

My husband had gone over to my mother's earlier in the day to help them do some gardening work, and left our dog there. We do this all the time, because his dog buddies are at my mother's house. One of them is a good friend, one of them he's basically neutral towards and the third one (the really dominant female who's five times bigger) he dislikes and avoids. Since we were having a dinner at their house later in the night, my husband figured we'd just pick up our little dog later.

I overreacted a bit because the social worker wouldn't get to see our little dog, but we made it up before she arrived. She did say she'd have to see him on the next visit though.

I hope our little dog gets along with our children. I'm slightly worried about him, because although he loves people, very small children confuse him. Once, we took him to the morning after a slumber party where there were ten shouting, laughing, bouncing-off-the-walls ten-year-old girls, and he behaved admirably and everyone loved him. But he growled at our three-year-old niece once. He did let her pet him later. I think he has a switch in his brain that tells him "a human equals anything over three feet tall". Shorter humans don't flip that switch, so he's not sure if they're a friendly animal or a dangerous animal, like a cat. He's so scared of cats (and so dimwitted) he once got startled and growled at a Halloween black cat decoration.

If a human under three feet tall joins the household and he doesn't get over this confusion I guess we could hire a trainer.

The homestudy visit was fine. I feel like we already know each other pretty well, because the social worker taught a lot of our classes, and we've met with her before at the office. She had a few specific guidelines that were new to us, but overall, it turns out she has less safety concerns than I do. For example, I walked her out to the backyard and pointed at some of the big dead branches on the pine trees and mentioned my mother had a friend who used to a be a logger and he said the loggers called those branches "widowmakers" so we needed to get a tree service out there and trim them. I don't think she was particularly interested in all that.