Moving toward fostering.....

Well we decided to move along toward our foster license. Our hope is to take only legal risk placements. Legal risk placements are usually when there is a very good chance the child will come up for adoption but it is not 100%. They can only place children in a "straight adopt" home when they are 100% free. DFPS is now wanting to move children sooner & sooner. So now when a child has a TPR (termination of parental rights), they immediately move that child into a foster to adopt home if their current foster parents choose not to adopt them. Though their parental rights have been terminated there is still a 90 day grace period for appeal, or for an alternate family member to come forward for the child. Previously they would let the child remain in the foster home until they were 100% free & THEN move then to a "straight adopt" home. There are a few good things about this situation, the first is we could end up with a much younger child. For example, our son was taken at birth, & had TPR done when he was 19 months old. By the time he came home to us, he was 28 months. Had we been willing to foster to adopt, or accept legal risk placements, he would have been home 9 months sooner. The other good thing about doing legal risk, or fostering is that we could get a placement faster. There are more kids waiting for foster families than straight adopt homes. The downside to the whole situation is that risk that the child will not stay. In order to get our foster license we had to get a fire inspection & take another training class. We got our fire inspection last week & are scheduled to complete our last training class the 2nd week in November. We are hoping to have our home study go to committee the first week or two of November.

The choice of two paths.....

I would like to start this blog by saying, this experience in NO way reflects the agency we use, how they have treated us as a whole during this adoption, or our previous adoption, but it does show how one person can throw a wrench in the whole process.Well, yesterday we got really bad news from our adoption agency. I feel the news they told us warranted a phone call, not an email, but I guess that's personal opinion. Up until this point (over 5 months in) we have been working to get our license to do straight adopt. We selected the 0-5 age range, in order to keep our kids in age order, and we wanted a girl. Apparently, our agency stopped licensing families in this age range to straight adopt awhile ago. The email we received yesterday from our home study worker basically said either we agree to foster, or we're done. We have not wanted to foster for the simple fact it would devastate our son to have a sibling, then that child go away. Our home study worker & her supervisor caught the mistake. I was completely blind sided & felt like I was punched in the stomach since up until this point our recruiter NEVER said this to us. We were told we could go the straight adopt route, we just need to accept a child of any race, which we were willing to do. I just don't understand how we made it this far in the process & no one had double checked our recruiters work. They do admit this was an error on the recruiters part & will be handling that accordingly. In order for us to proceed inside our age range with our current agency, we would be required to get licensed to foster first. We do have the option to leave this agency & try through another one, but we would have to start completely fresh with every document, reference & training class. At this point we have decided to move ahead & pursue our foster license with the hope of accepting a legal risk child. Sometimes it is hard to remember that our path is rocky, but it will lead us to our family. I pray that there is a reason we are being led down this road. Even after so many years, 3 miscarriages & more tears than I can count, when I look at my son, I would do every single bit of it again to have him. I hope in a couple years when we look back on this time, we say the same thing for our daughter.

Home study time.....

 

Well, I know I have been kinda MIA lately so I thought I would post a little update. We are scheduled for our home study tomorrow morning. We have the same home study worker as last time, so that's nice. The other surprising thing is since we've already done one with their agency they only need to do one visit for an update to the one they already have. Hopefully we head to committee to get our home study approved & begin submitting on children by the end of the month. I will post a little update tomorrow after our visit just to give a heads up on exactly what happened. We have also been busy & had to postpone our home study because our little boy had his tonsils removed last Friday. This was his third surgery in 18 months & his second since June. I did research before hand to see how the recovery was from this surgery & I'm not sure if that was a curse or a blessing. On one hand I was prepared for the crying, vomiting & lack of eating, but I was also dreading it. As of the last couple days he is doing much better & is eating & drink a bit more. We are very excited to move on to the next leg of this journey & start submitting our home study for children! (The photo above is Tuck after we got home, he was feeling pretty good because the morphine from the hospital hadn't worn off yet).

Crystal