2015 August

Allot of people worry about how being a foster family will affect their forever kids (kids already in your home). Its a valid concern. There are some extreme (and exaggerated) cases out there that I am sure you’ve heard of through your local busy body.

Apart from that their is the emotional roller coaster that your forever kids will experience.

I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it will be a piece of cake for your precious kiddos or for you. It won’t be. I get it because I’ve experienced it. I’ve comforted Mr. H as his heart filled with sadness that his (foster) brother Sam and his (foster) sister Olivia wouldn’t be coming home to him again. He was crushed and it was hard. I’ve watched as he experienced the loss of most of my attention since there were very traumatized children that needed me. I’ve seen the bite marks Sam gave him that nearly drew blood.

When I contemplated these things I seriously considered never fostering again. I would just make myself stop caring about all the other kids out there who need homes (as if). I would simply let go of my dreams of a big family or I would find a different way to expand our family. My son just might end up an only child who spent a lot of time with friends in order to satiate his desire for great amounts of social interaction.

As I comforted my little boy and pondered all these things the thought came to “It is good for him”. It was a calm and peaceful thought that was definitely not my own. In fact I credit it to the Holy Spirit. Why then is it a good thing for my son to experience these things? Upon reflection I realized that these experiences are teaching him things in a way no other experience will so vibrantly provide. Being a foster family is providing me with a wealth of opportunities to teach my son that I might not have had or noticed. Even better, we are having all of these teaching opportunities with him at home while he is young. He is learning things that probably wouldn’t have come up before grade school, but these lessons are preparing him for what he will face when he finely starts spending most of his waking hours outside our home.

In the end, its totally worth it.

I want to share something with you. It is the story of how we first became parents. It isn’t filled with cute announcements, a creative way to tell the dad to be that he is a dad to be, or a baby shower. There was no gender reveal or pregnancy shoot. There was infertility, tears, prayers and answers.

We got married in 2010 after a quick engagement. Hubby had job starting in a different state and we wanted to be married before then so two months was all the time my wonderful mother (bless her) had to prepare a wedding for her starry-eyed daughter whose head was in a cloud (sorry mom). Hubby and I knew we didn’t want to wait to have children and we didn’t feel that we should use birth control anyways. We hoped a baby would come soon but the baby never did. When I described the time I thought I was pregnant to the doctor he said that I had most likely miss carried. My body did that twice. I cried….a lot.

We moved again so my husband could finish school. Two years went by. We prayed. We used the bit of savings we had on some fertility tests and treatment. Still there was no baby. We prayed some more and fasted. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were supposed to be parents and that their was a child who needed us. We desperately wanted the privilege of having children in our home. Being a mom was the thing that I wanted to be more then anything when I grew up and I just knew that Hubby and I were meant to be parents.

Adoption was something that I had always thought I would do. At the time our church had an adoption agency where the costs were significantly lower then any other agency. The fees were so low that we could afford it even on our student budget. We also considered adopting a waiting child from foster care, being foster parents or just continuing to focus on the chance of a biological child. We did our research, prayed some more and then felt that Heavenly Father wanted us to be foster parents.

We took the classes, got our home study, and then got our license. Amidst all of the todos I felt to ask the Lord that our first placement would be one that would need us forever. A placement that would make it so we were never childless again. We both knew that not all of our kids would stay. We were both ok with that. We also knew that sometimes kids have to stay, so for our first go around I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask Heavenly Father for one that was going to need a new forever home. When we became available we were placed with a wonderful little boy. We became Mom and Dad to him. Two years later that little boy is our forever son and we are so grateful for him.

Have a g’day,

Gum Tree

Archives for August 2015

What Foster Care is Teaching My Forever Kids

Becoming Mom and Dad {Our Journey to Being Foster Parents}