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!

Ready and Watiting...

We are in a holding pattern. We have completed all our paperwork, had our inspection, done our interviews, supplied references and all "additional information" requested, yet our license has yet to be submitted to the OLCR (the state agency that actually issues the license). The hold up is all about our training. We somehow ended up with no documentation of the training we completed the first time we were licensed. We remember getting certificates, but we can't find them, and our original agency is dragging their feet on supplying our new agency with our file. The file is required to have that documentation, so as soon as our worker gets her hands on the file we should be good to go.  We hope. *sigh*

Getting started...all over again.

We are on the brink of being officially licensed for foster care...again. We actually started this journey eight years ago when we became foster parents for the first time.
It had been a dream of my husbands to be a foster parent ever since he became friends with a foster child who had been adopted by her foster family. He got to see first hand how they changed her life, and he wanted to be that family for someone else. He is amazing like that. I however wasn't excited about the idea...or even interested...at all. I was one of those people who believed all the horror stories and all the myths about why you should never, ever, consider foster care. THEN, one day shortly after the birth of our second little girl (2 babies in two years!) we started talking about adoption. Now, this had always been my dream. I wanted to adopt internationally. I had this dream for as long as I can remember. I am not even sure where the idea came from originally. I just knew it would be awesome! Oh, the idealism!  So, we started researching, and soon discovered that financially this was not going to be an option for quite some time to come, if ever. That is when my wonderful husband brought up foster care. He convinced me to at least look into it. So I did. That is when I realized just how many children there are out there that need good homes! So many just waiting for a family! My heart broke, and it changed. I was on board! We decided our next child would come to our family through foster care adoption. We contacted an agency and we began our paperwork. Our licensing worker was astounded at how fast we got things done! We had our license in a record breaking 2 months! At the time I did not fully appreciate her amazement, now I realize how truly blessed we were to have her working so hard for us and just how crazy-fast it really was! As we had two very small little ones (1 1/2 and 6mos) to consider, we initially were licensed for 0-5yr old children. It took almost two months after our license was done before we got our first phone call (we were later told that no one knew we were ready!).  We had our first placement, and the adventure was on! The next three years were a roller coaster ride. We had 10 children come through our home from 8 different placements (2 sibling sets), and eventually expanded out license so we could take older girls.  We dealt with prenatal drug exposure, fetal alcohol syndrome, developmental delays, seizures, behavioral issues, ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act), system failures, and all the other "joys" of being a foster parent, as well as the crushing sadness of the death of one of our children who had returned home to her family. We also got see some reunification successes, watch delayed children make huge strides to exceed expectations, and know that we played a part in giving these little ones a better start. Although our original goal was adoption we never did have the opportunity to adopt any of the children we cared for, and so when we found out we were expecting our third biological child we decided to take a break for awhile. Our young family had been through a lot of ups and downs and we felt like we needed to take a step back and focus on our little ones.

We always expected to come back to foster care, when the time was right. A while back we started feeling that the Lord was telling us it was time. So we started the process, only to be stalled when my dear husband's employment ran out. So we waited until we were once again employed. Only to stall out once more due to the restrictions of his schedule vs. training.  We started again, only to have our worker leave our agency for other employment and the new case manager was super unhelpful and had no clue how to re-license us, so she wanted us to start all over from scratch which meant NONE of our past training would be counted and we would have to attend 10 weeks of scheduled classes! So...we tried another agency. Thank heavens we did!! We got a case manager who knew exactly what to do and got us moving right away, with half the training hours! We are now only days away from submitting our homestudy! Whew! It has been crazy!

As for this new little blog out here in the blog-o-sphere...There has been a persistent niggling in the back of my mind for weeks now, telling me I should blog about our journey. I have learned not to ignore persistent niggles, so here I am, documenting the craziness! Good luck to us!