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...

  Friday, August 21 We began preparing for our first kiddo, Mr. D, the day before.  I had changed bed sheets and linens and put a few snacks in his room along a with note of how excited we were to have him and to make himself at home.  There were a few thing I wasn't sure about like, if would need help with homework for the weekend or not, as well as if we need to stock some toiletry items for him.  Also, wouldn't you know it, before he arrived the A/C froze up.  So, we are going to have to suffer through the weekend without A/C. It seems, every time we have guests the A/C goes out!!  Adding it to the repair list and moving on.  It is what it is. Now the question of what will we do this weekend comes up.  I figured we would just got with the flow and kind of let him dictate it, whether we just chill and hang out or if we will be active.  Trying not to force anything on him or pushing him do things, even though we would be excited to do all ki...

  Wednesday, August 19 Typically we get a phone call for a placement but this time I got a text message.  I get a lot of text messages throughout the day.  Mostly notifications, some spam, and of course, some actually communication with a real human. After a little bit I remembered I had a message that I hadn't looked at.  I would have looked at it immediately but I didn't recognize the number so I just thought is was either spam or a notification.  When I checked it, it was a very brief message. My thought was, "well, this could be a good thing because it will help us have a little bit of experience" and "we don't really have anything else going on this weekend, so why not?".  With that, I picked up the phone and called her to find out more information. The conversation was just as brief as the text message.  Probably no more then about 5-10 minutes.  But, before I called the agency back, I called the wife.  Then I reached out to her and fou...

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...