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!