Our Fostering Journey

 Thursday, August 13, 2020 I woke up this morning with an intuitive feeling.  Now, I don't always speak about my intuition or my family's intuitive "power" but sometimes you just can't ignore it.  My VERY FIRST thought was of our future foster son.   I had a deep feeling that today, we were going to receive a call.  Now, that call could be for the "one", our forever kid, or could be for a temporary placement.  Either way, I didn't know.  I kept this feeling to myself until it happened. First, it was a message saying that we were officially approved by DCS as being certified and that our home was now "Open". Next was the message the agency was actively searching for a kiddo for our family.  A couple of hours later we got word. It was a message to check out a profile on www.adoptuskids.org.  So I checked it out and watched the video while I was waiting for my lunch order.  I thought, "Okay, we will see if this kid seems like a good fi...

After we made our initial interest known it began the ball rolling.  I will say that it can be pretty intense and time consuming between attending the training sessions as well as the required paperwork, biographies, interviews, and background checks.  Youth Villages was very good and breaking things down for us, otherwise, it would be just overwhelming and I think most people would just quit before ever getting started if they knew the full extent of getting "certified".  The paperwork alone would stop anyone. There were several training sessions we had to attend through DCS and then we had some additional sessions hosted by Youth Villages.  Each session was approximately 3-4 hours.  Because of COVID we had to do all this through web conferencing.  Attendance is taken each time and if you miss a session you are required to make it up.  Considering they only offer these sessions periodically that means it could push you timeline WAY back to getting cer...

Well, this is kind of hard to answer.  Believe it or not this is one of the first questions asked when you are applying to become a foster parent.  Everyone's story can be unique.  For some it is because they are unable to have kids of their own.  For others it could be that they have already been parents to "bio-kids" (their own biollogical kids) and now may have empty nest syndrome and still have plenty of love to give.  Or perhaps they are current parents with kids still living at home and want to have a bigger family or they of course have room to spare in their homes and in their hearts. For us, well, it is the first one.  My wife has a genetic disease that runs in her family and we chose early on that we didn't want to pass that disease one to a child.  The odds were 50/50 but I don't know if it would be ethical to do so with the odds.  For some people they chose to have kids anyways and let God decide and I get that act of faith too.  ...