Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Getting Our Feet Wet

Embarrassingly enough, I actually kinda sorta forgot about my blog for a while.  And by a while, I mean for about 6 months...

These past few months have been challenging and amazing and truly demanded all of my attention.  At the time of my last post, we were in process of getting licensed to be foster parents.  Not long afterwards, our license was granted and we got our feel wet really quickly when we were placed with a precious nearly one year old little girl for two months within weeks.  I can honestly say that giving her back was one of the hardest things I have had to do and I'll probably write a post about it all later.  Our county is swamped with Child Protective Services cases right now and I recently heard that there are over 500 kids in foster care here.  Almost immediately, we started getting calls for other kids.  The week we were placed with our current foster daughter, I got four calls asking me if I would take kids.  I'm only licensed to be able to take one child right now, otherwise I probably would have more.  It is probably a good thing though, since I really have my hands full at the moment with our three boys and our sweet little infant girl whom we have had for four months now.  I can't really give details about her, but she has some major health issues (thankfully doing really well!) and taking care of her and working with social services has become really like a big part time job.  Our boys are all doing great and absolutely love her and are passionate about what we are doing.  I dearly want to raise them to be men who see the needs of others around them and are willing to step up and do something about it.  We try to shelter them from the bulk of information about the situations we are involved in, but it is important they grow up knowing that others are far less fortunate than us.