Our wait is over!

We had our first placement! The first one was just a respite placement but it was fun and we adored the kids :) Before I go any further let me explain the type of placements that we are taking;

Transitional Respite- Sometimes when case workers remove children from a home they do not have a foster home available to immediately bring them to. So while they look for a foster home they bring them to a respite family (like us!) Who help them understand what is happening and cope a little bit. These placements will usually be for just a few days or sometimes only a single night. Then the children move on to a more permanent foster home and work on reunification with the biological family.

Respite- Foster parents have 14 days a year that they can put the foster children who are with them into a respite home so that they can go out of town or if they have a medical issue or something like that. The state pays the respite family to babysit so that they know the kids are in a good licensed home. These are also usually a short coupe days.

Foster- These children would be placed in our home for a longer period. anywhere from 3-12 months. They could also potentially become available for us to adopt in which case we most likely would. During the time they are with us we would be helping them to work on reuniting with there parents. The parents spend that time going through intensive therapy and work to reach multiple steps to earn the kids back. They get to see the children for one hour once a week for visitation while they do the work.

So now that I got that out of the way, we had a respite placement! It was just for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We had freedom who was Three and her ten year old brother, Red. They were great kids and we had so much fun. We were lucky enough to have them during Halloween weekend while we were doing pumpkins and what not.
There is a good chance we will have them again :)

A little good news

         I intend to eventually be able to post pictures and write a little about each child that comes into our lives on this blog. So far we are yet to have one of these so called children. I was beginning to think no one wanted us to have any kids :( Luckily that is not the case.
      Adoption update: We have been inquiring on child after child trying to be considered for adoption of many kids who are already legally free ( Parents rights have already been relinquished). We have gotten some what far in the process for a few children but so far have not been chosen. I am attempting to be patient and understanding when we are not chosen. I know that they are very picky when it comes to who gets these kids and they are right to do so. These kids have had it tough and deserve to be very carefully placed. I will continue to inquire on child after child and keep my fingers crossed that we will soon be the best match for the right child!
          Foster care update: We have now been licensed and waiting for a placement for 4 months. We were asked to take the 3 different short term placements but none of them worked out for one reason or another. We had not however been asked to take any ong term foster placement. I had a meeting with our case worker, Elaine on Monday and I got a lot of refreshing news. A big part of why we had not been given placements was because she had not updated our profile with a new assessment. We were apparently supposed to have this meeting a long while ago but she had been busy and not gotten to us. Now that we are all updated we should start seeing a lot more placement opportunities.
         Elaine also spoke with me about Davids previous rug use. She mentioned that her boss Cody was wanting to wait until Davids 3 year sobriety anniversary before giving us any real serious foster placements that could turn into adoptions. His 3 year is in two weeks :) I am very proud of him and the man that he has become. He is so much different now and has grown so much that I really never think about those days anymore.  Elaine said that she is going to start calling us first with all of the short term respite cases that she gets and we can take the ones that are good fits for us. That will give us some experience so that as soon as a Foster placement comes up for us we will be ready to go!

Updates to come soon I hope!

Mentor Program

waiting, waiting and WAITING!!! Feels like it has been forever since we got our license and we still don't have a placement! It is so hard for me to wait patiently for something like this. To pass the time I have spent a lot of time "shopping" for a daughter in the adoption profiles. There have been a few that I have been interested in and inquired on but no luck yet. They are very picky about who they will consider for adoptive families and that is understandable. Those kids deserve to have some one be picky for them and hold out for the best.
    Some of you probably remember a few months ago I was really interested in a girl named Shade. She feels familiar to me and I am always drawn to her profile for some reason. I feel like I am meant to be in her life somehow. After a lot of thought and talking to a lot of people we decided that we were probably not the best fit to be her parents because she is 15 and would likely feel as if we were more like older siblings when she really needs a mom and dad. Ever since we made that decision I think about her a lot and about all the other older kids who are available for adoption but will most likely not ever be adopted. They call it "Aging out of the system" But that is just fancy talk for leaving them to fend for them self when they turn 18. There are not very many support systems for these kids and they will live the rest of there life without a forever familly. Graduations, wedding, pregnancies, births, and everything in-between will be experiences without the support and love of parents and siblings.  I don't know that I can think of a darker more lonely life.
     The one resource that these kids have to help them to cope is a mentor program. Of course I had to join. It pairs stable, adjusted adults with 17-19 year old teens coming out of foster care. They set each mentor up with 1 or 2 kids at a time and ask that you mentor them for 2 years as they adjust and become independent. They need help looking for jobs, applying for college, finding apartments, learning to budget, shop cook, clean and some of them need guidance in parenting if they have become young parents them self.
    Some day, when our young kids are grown I think I would enjoy taking in teens and becoming there forever family. Until then I hope that this mentor program can be a way for me to make a difference for a small number of them.

So close but no cigar :(

        I was so excited to have these two little girls with us for our first respite placement. Tuesday morning the foster mother of the girls called to let me know that the bio grandparents had decided to take them for the weekend so we wouldn't be needed after all. I was a little bummed but I know that the girls will be happier to have spent that time with grandma and grandpa. I am now axiously awaiting our next placement oppertunity. Our trainer told us during training that we should try not to be to excited about placements seeing as how for us to get a placement a child has to be in a bad situation. We don't want to wish that n any child even if it does mean we get a baby to love for a while. :)
        Elaine ( Our case worker) Emailed me today to ask if we were interested in a 6 day respite placement of four boys. The boys are quite a bit older then we were planning on taking on and David is currently out of town on work so I felt like it was best to turn it down and let the boys go to a home more suited for them for the week. I think David would have had a heart attack had he come home to 4 preteen/teenaged boys haha. He was a little caught off guard when we were called so quickly for the first time to take the two girls! I felt like it was the begining of the next step after a long wait but he felt surprised and almost not quite ready :) Difference between a man and a woman I suppose ;)

Until next time...

We are foster parents!!

          David and I are about to begin a whole new exciting side of parenthood. We are Foster parents! I wanted a new blog to journal this journey, all though our journey certainly didn't start here. We decided about a year ago that The foster Care system was going to be our road to adoption. We worked together to get through all of the training and preparing. All the hard work has finally paid off as we will get our first placement in two days! We are doing respite care along with regular foster care. Respite is short term like 2-3 days while fostering can be as long as a year or turn into an adoption into our forever family.
        I am not able to post specific details about the children online and I am not supposed to display these children publicly. I have decided that I will blog about each child here for my family to see in this private blog then I will keep my own physical scrapbook of all the children here at home where I can feel free to include as many details and pictures as I want :) Well here goes! I am sooooooo excited to post about our first two little girls this weekend :)