It's Official!

We received the email this morning...we are licensed!! :) Our cw called to congratulate us and let us know she is getting us put on the placement roster today, so we can start receiving kids right away. Now we just have to wait for the first placement call! :)

Another information request

We got another email from the OLCR this afternoon, with a request for MORE information. I called our cw and read her the email (she was away from her office) and she laughed a bit and told me how she had already included all the information requested. I remember her asking me all the questions and having an entire conversation around it as well. Apparently there are a few folks at the licensing office who are not thorough readers. All in all, we did have to provide a new copy of our car registration and insurance again as both had expired and been renewed since she had first collected copies, but other than that she had everything she needed to take care of the request. She promised to resend all the information this evening and predicted we will have our license by tomorrow or the day after. I will not hold my breath, but I will keep my fingers crossed.

waiting again

We our still waiting on our license to be issued. We attended a foster parent appreciation event put on by our agency last Saturday (SO much fun, and so very much appreciated!) and were able to visit with our worker for a bit. She told us she had received the anticipated email from the OLCR requesting "additional information" and had submitted the information asked for, so our license should be completed within a few days. We still have yet to hear from the OLCR though, and that was over a week ago. Of course we have to figure in actual "working business days", which means they have only had about four working days so we aren't out of the realm of "a few days" by much yet.  It just seems to be so much longer! Waiting is hard!

Moving Forward

Our licensing request has officially been submitted! Our worker says we should have our license by the end of the week! Yay! We are really excited, and a bit nervous. 

To emphasize just how real it is, we already had our first placement call.  Our agency is frantically trying to find a potential adoptive placement for a 14yr old girl, and our worker thought we might be open to the placement (she would not have been placed until after our license was officially issued). This is where all the stuff I have learned over the past few months from all the foster and adoption blogs I have been reading really payed off. 
I started asking all the questions I never knew I could ask before, like:

• What is her history? 
• Where is the bio family and does she have contact/visitation? 
• Are there behavioral/aggression issues? 
• Is she ok with younger kids? 
• Why is she being moved from her current placement? 

There were a few additional questions that came up through the answers to the first ones as well and I got more information than I would ever have expected.  We kept our minds open despite some behavioral issues that gave us pause, determined to not say "no" until we had a chance to reflect, discuss, and pray about if these were issues we could handle. Honestly, most of the issues are exactly what you would expect to see from a 14yr old child from a difficult background. Definitely a child from "hard places".  In the end we didn't need to give a yes or no answer. Through the process of asking all the right questions her caseworker contacted the current foster mother to ask if having younger children in the home might be an issue. Turns out, that would be a very big issue. A few other things came to light, and her worker decided our home would not be a good fit (she was worried about situations that could be dangerous to our young children).
SO, what is my point in writing about all this? If we hadn't asked the right questions and really taken an honest look at what we could or couldn't handle we might have ended up agreeing to a placement that could have been very damaging to not only our family, but to this young girl as well. She wants desperately to be adopted, and bringing her into our home and then having things go badly would have been crushing to her.

It was a crazy few hours of back and forth phone calls, and left us feeling a bit overwhelmed, but excited for the future. This girls caseworker also says she has another 14yr old girl she wants us to consider once our license is official, so we will be expecting another call from her. We will approach that potential placement in the same way. I know most of these kids come with some hard issues, and we are willing to face those issues and do what we can to help the kids overcome them, but we would rather be prepared before hand than blindsided later. There will always be surprises, but the more we know ahead of placement the easier it will be to deal with the unexpected.

Other exciting events in our home right now: We got a much bigger than expected tax return (an answer to prayers!!), and our 3yr old decided yesterday that he was ready to potty train! We have had only four accidents in two days! We are so proud, and very happy to be done with diapers.  It has been an exciting day for sure.  Parenting means celebrating the small stuff! hahaha!

File found!

On Monday I got the call I was hoping for from the supervisor at our old licensing agency! She had our file on her desk and she quickly emailed me the documentation I needed. I was able to forward it on to our caseworker, who was very happy to receive it. We should be all set to move forward with our license now! Sooooo excited!

Got a Crib!

That is the extent of progress towards our license right now: We got a crib. I found one second hand at a price we could afford, which meets all the requirements. Which is important, but really...shouldn't we be done by now?! We are still waiting for our old licensing agency to send our new licensing agency our file. Which only highlights exactly why we are switching agencies. (I do have to say though, that all three of our licensing workers at our old agency were great, they really were! They have ALL left said agency though, which is why we went through three in three years, and again highlights why we switched.) So, on Thursday our LW called me and asked me to please call the supervisor that is in charge of handling agency changes at our old agency. She has spoken to the supervisor a few times, and keeps getting told they are "working on it" and that our file is archived and it "takes awhile" to pull it out of archives (My worker and I are in agreement that six weeks is more than "awhile" and more than adequate time). We are hoping that hearing from me personally will prompt her to hurry things along a bit.  It's only a slender hope, but it's all we've got. So, since I called on Friday and left her a message (because of course I couldn't get hold of her personally), I am hoping for a return call today, or even a small miracle (I do believe in those!) and have her actually find the file and maybe even put it in the mail! A girl can dream, can't she? 

delays...

I haven't heard from our worker in awhile and I am wondering if we have hit another snag. Our training certificates have to be in our old agency file or we will probably end up having to complete more training. Ugh! Our worker probably hasn't gotten the files from our old agency yet, thus the lack of communication, but the waiting is driving me bonkers! I am thinking I may give her a call today and see if she has received the file.

My other current licensing delay: I have to find a crib. I was told that in order to be licensed for infants we now have to have an actual crib. Not a bassinet or a pack-n-play, as those are now considered temporary beds by CPS. Which makes me shake my head, because when we did foster care previously we had two different infant placements, both of whom slept in the pack-n-play bassinet. My last two bio children never slept in anything but a pack-n-play when they were infants! They all started out in the bassinet, then when they could sit up we removed the bassinet and they slept in the pack-n-play itself.  We have to play by the new rules though, so now I am on the hunt for a baby crib. The frustrating part is finding a decent crib at a low budget price. We don't have the money to put into a brand new crib right now, so I am on the lookout for a second hand one. We live in a small area though, so finding one is proving to be tricky. As soon as one is posted for sale at a decent price on any website it is snatched up. Hopefully my timing improves and I will grab a good one soon.