foster care

The Health Inspector Cometh

February 21, 2012

Today is our last hurdle before our foster care papers are submitted to the agency and county: a visit from the county health inspector.

[cue ominous music] Duhn duh, duhhhhhh!

We’ve been assured by other foster parents that it’s an easy visit to check that it’s generally clean, the refrigerator is cold enough, and that the water doesn’t run scalding hot. The fridge was 36-37, there was ice in the freezer, and our hottest faucet (the kitchen) was 105 when I tested everything this morning.

He said it only takes 15 minutes, so it can’t be all that thorough looking in every nook and cranny, but it’s a little intimidating. He could have come today but it was laundry day, so we didn’t think that was the best presentation we could offer… or anywhere close. Laundry is one of those things that gets worse before it gets better, you know?

We have been looking forward to this point for so many months, it’s almost surreal.

Then after work

We have our friends Jim and Denise Fahr coming over to Tampa/Brandon while they are with Denise’s parents at their time-share about an hour away on the west side of Orlando/Disneyworld. The CF Wives are meeting at Olive Garden for dinner and invited Denise along. The rules are that you 1) have to be a wife 2) of a CFer to join the Facebook group. They share all kinds of info, stories, and trials – and I’m sure some triumphs along the way.

Jim and I are both Mac-addicts, so we’ll hit up the Apple Store at the mall after the four of us have some time together. Jim had his double-lung transplant shortly after I started this site – let’s see, it was May of 2010. Ever since he was on the mend and back to being himself, we struck up a friendship of mutual respect for being driven, hard-working dudes who are crazy about their wife. [Read more…]

Home Study Completed – Moving Fast Now

February 8, 2012

Well, we sure breathed a big sigh of relief today around 1:30 when our home study was done. We were told how long to expect the rest of the process to take from this point on! What? I’m not going to say just yet – you have to know what happened, don’t you?

Delightful news first: she said we were the most organized applicants in months. Would you expect nothing less from Beautiful? What we didn’t have filled out yet, we reviewed and signed on the spot. The documents and paperwork she didn’t have yet, such as our marriage license and our last 2 years of tax returns (I gave her this year’s PayPal 1099-K for good measure), we came upstairs to the office and ran off copies of everything she needed.

We took a field trip up the the bedrooms. I was shocked to hear someone who does home studies for the entire county – all applicants – give a big “awwwww” when she saw the nursery. Good job, again, Beautiful. We had to take the bumper out of the crib and take a photo, which I immediately e-mailed to her from my phone. Then we went to the “big boy room” since it’s a double bed and blue bedding for now. She liked it very much, also. Again, another photo and e-mail.

Back downstairs, we ran through more paperwork and got some questions asked about licensing for one at at time vs a sibling group. [Read more…]

Home Study: the Big Test for Foster Care

February 7, 2012

As most of you know who’ve been reading a while, our foster care process started a year ago. We had our ups and downs financially, but now our ups are so much better than our downs are bad, we are ready to keep moving forward. We have had our backgrounds checked, fingerprints taken, medical exams done, and our moral character notarized. Today, at 11am EST, we have our home study!

What is a home study?

Well, we’re not exactly sure. We haven’t done this before, but we have been told quite a bit from several sources, so here’s what we think will go down:

we’ll finish up some paperwork
we’ll find out we haven’t received some paperwork that we still need to do
we’ll have 95% of our house approved with some changes remaining
we’ll get licensed for both spare bedrooms and a broader age range, but that will lead to the house only being 90% approved
there will be some sense of relief and disappointment that we’re not done yet

Leftover tidbits

I started writing a post a couple of weeks ago, and this is all that should be published from that brain dump because I wasn’t thinking positively for a good week or so. I hope it clears up some questions about foster care that people ask us. We don’t mind questions, but these should fix some misconceptions about fostering:

No, we aren’t fostering to adopt. That does not exist, or at least not in Florida. The goal is always reunification with family members unless they are already seeking to terminate parental rights (TPR), in which case, temporary care is needed for 6-12 months until that is final and an adoption can proceed. Foster parents do get “first dibs,” but obviously not every placement is going to be a good match due to thousands of possible factors.
No, we don’t get to pick out who to foster. We don’t know what age or gender or race. We can safely assume we need to be ready for anything within the parameters we are comfortable with. Here’s what happens, and it’s just like the show COPS: someone is bad, an idiot, or having a rough spell and the cops, CPS, or other agency steps in and removes a child or sibling group from a situation. They have 24 hours to get them into a group home or foster home. They call everyone on their list for fostering and we can ask some questions and accept or turn down a placement due to age, medical issues, the situation behind the removal, or because we are at our licensed limit for placement at the moment. We are then to care for them until they are reunited or placed with an adoptive family. Beautiful also wrote about this yesterday.

We’ve met several CFers who have done in vitro, have a CFer practically across the street who did international adoption, but so far we haven’t met any of the half-dozen or so CFers I know through Facebook who are fostering or have fostered. This is a new world of parenting for us and for everyone who is close to us, so 2012 is going to be an interesting year for a lot of us.

Fostering and the Lonely Road of Pre-placement

January 24, 2012

Today is a bit of a raw post about the fostering process. Raw emotions and some brain dump to cope and move on with my day rather than mulling over these feelings for hours. Forgive me if this sounds rude or ungrateful for the good things that have happened. They’ve happened, but this feeling persists.

This is the oddest I’ve felt for as long as I can remember. Planning to have kids is supposed to feel exciting (and it does), not lonely and misunderstood (but it does). I can’t exactly put a finger on it, but there is a great divide between how people act/react to announcing that you’re expecting and announcing that you’re adopting or fostering.

People have asked [Read more…]