Progress!

So we have waited and waited and waited some more in our quest to find a match. Our wonderful, dedicated case worker told us at our meeting last week that we have blown all her other families out of the water with the number of inquiries we have put in on available children. We have had some interviews with case workers that haven't gone anywhere. It has been an exhausting process.
However, at our meeting last week something changed. First, our caseworker had been contacted by a neighboring County that wanted to interview is as a possible match for a 6 year old little girl. Then she said that our agency has a 3 year old little boy that needed a family.
So, long story short, we have a 3 year old staying with us this weekend as a trial to see if we get along.  :-) We are having a blast, and we hope to be able to say soon that he will be coming to live with us permanently.
Just as an FYI, we will not be posting any pictures online of any children until an adoption is finalized.

Waiting and waiting some more

Sorry for the long period between posts. There hasn't been much to talk about. On the adoption front we continue to try tu find a match, but one has not yet been found. We are trying our best to just be patient even though it isn't always easy. We did however have a lovely experience in providing respite care for 2 adorable little girls in October.
The younger of the two was the same baby we had in September. We also had her 3 year old sister. We ended up keeping the girls for 10 days and it was a blast. They were such sweeties. We wished we could have kept them.
Keeping them was great practice though, for both us and the dogs. Gypsy and Obi let the girls crawl all over them with no complaints. Loki just kept trying to clean up all of the crumbs.
We really had a great experience and will do respite care again if the opportunity comes up.

First Respite Care Experience

Last weekend we were asked to provide respite care for a six month old little girl. We, of course, said yes. Respite care, in the foster care system, means that a foster parent has a need for temporary extended care. It could be that they need to go out of town and the foster child is not free to be taken out of town or some other reason.

We were told that we would have her from early Saturday morning to early Sunday morning and nothing else. We emailed our case worker to at least find out if there were any allergies we should know about. There were none.

She was the sweetest thing. Hardly a fuss in the 24 hours she was with us. I do wish that we were a little more set up for a 6 month old. However, I am confident that if we end up with a child that young we will have what we need.

As for the rest, still crickets.....................

Stasis

We have a running joke going between us about the adoption. If only one of us freaks out at a time then we are good. The real trouble will start if we both freak out at the same time.

We have placed a ton of inquiries into children and sets of children, my guess would be around 35 so far. We have had sparse feedback. I know our case worker is doing her best to try and contact people and get updates or even contact people, but it is dreadfully slow and there is little feedback. We had been told that they would start interviewing families for a pair of brothers at the end of July or beginning of August, we have heard nothing back. Apparently, it is not the normal case that they let you know if they chose not to interview you, or they found another family etc. I personally think some of this process needs some automation. Even if it is a list of families that are interested in a certain child(ren) that sends automatic emails out to folks to say that so and so has found a home. That way we may be sad, if we had our hopes up, but we can be glad they have found a loving home also.

Recently we've had a bit of turn about is fair play. We have had 2 case workers contact our case worker and ask if we were interested in a set of children. Both times we got little more information than their ages, but we have replied, YES! to each. So now our profile goes out to the case worker for the children and if they like us, I assume, we will then get the children's profiles. It is a good feeling to know that we are being picked for something, even if we hear crickets afterwards.

So for now, its Sit! Stay! for both of us.

Waiting... watching... hoping......

So we are waiting.... And waiting.... And waiting some more. Adoption is definitely not a speedy process.

We have been done with the certification process for about a month now. At this point, we have perused the big book of children that our case worker has.  Prior to her visit this week she had been to a conference and gotten quite a few more fliers. We did get a bit smarter with the book this time, we used removable flags to identify kids we wanted to learn now about. It was definitely a helpful tactic add the book is over 3 inches thick

So our case worker, Amanda, is researching several more kids and sets of kids. We have also widened our age range from 0-13. With our looking, we decided it was a logical move for us.

We also have our profile in with the case worker for a pair of boys. They are going through the profiles that have been submitted and decide who they want to interview as possible matches.

One dream Two strategies

We discovered a difference in approaches to foster / adoption Wednesday that I don't think we realized existed before.

Our caseworker had contacted us to let us know that there were some children that were available and in their big book of brochures, but not on the PA website. She was going to be in the area so she offered to drop over Wednesday night at 5 PM.

We both raced home that night and barely were in the door before she showed up with an extremely thick binder. Unfortunately, there was no separation of brochures that were on the website and ones not on the website, so we dug in. Reading the descriptions back to back to back was a challenge. Not only does Susan read about 3-4X as fast as me, but some of these were copies of copies of copies, and the descriptions started to look like cookie cutter write ups. One sentence about what foods they like, one about activities they like, and perhaps a line or two on personality and a vague description of any health issues.

As we perused the binder, we noted some children that we might want to know some more about, and this is where things got confusing for me. Time was running down and our caseworker had to leave for another appointment. Susan spoke up and asked the caseworker to get us more information for 5+ kids or sibling groups that we had looked at. This took me totally by shock.

You see, from my point of view we were "just browsing", and we would talk about the kids alone later and come back to it, narrow it down, see if we are drawn to any one child or sibling group and then ask for more information. Unfortunately, my habit is to mull things over and evaluate and re-evaluate something until I've come to a conclusion. I think this serves me well in my profession, but not necessarily in my personal life.

Susan's perspective, if I can be allowed to attempt to describe it, is that any kids we are interested in we should get more information on, then do some more evaluation on our feelings etc. I've taken to referring to this as the shotgun approach, where I would describe my approach as a laser approach. Focus in on one child or sibling group and follow up. I don't think there is anything wrong with either approach, but it really gave both of us a shock to find out each other had different expectations of the process we were going to follow. For now, we are going to take the shotgun approach. We are hoping that this way there will be less of a let down when children we are interested in are not available. We've already had that happen once and I think we were both saddened when the listing for the child disappeared. It will also give us a chance to explore the process and work out any other details of the process.

We are also struggling over waiting for our image of an "ideal" addition to the family versus helping out every child we see. It's very a very emotional process because your heart goes out to so many kids you see in the foster care system and I feel guilty and selfish if I say no to any one of them.

All this and we haven't even gotten to the stage of meeting with any kids and hoping that the fit feels right from both sides.

Red Tape, Shredded, now the waiting begins

We have gotten through all of the red tape of certification! We are now certified as a foster family and have begun the process of matching.

Matching could go quickly, or take years. We've already made one inquiry that did not pan out. The child was removed from the list within a week of our inquiry. We were also approached about a child, however, we unfortunately had to defer. The child needed more care than a household with 2 working parents could possibly manage.

We believe we are only starting what will prove to be the roller coaster ride of our lives. Fasten your seat belts, keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times.

Enjoy the Ride!