Classes finished... again

    For two evenings this week my wife and I attended classes to retrain on the American Heart Association method of CPR and First Aid.  It was not difficult nor was it unpleasant though, as it often has been in the past, it was a little slow.  I found the Heart Association class to be a fairly low stress affair after my experiences taking the Red Cross classes (CPR for the Professional Rescuer) when I was certified as a Life Guard.  Red Cross classes involved far more hands on application and more rigorous testing (including a fairly difficult written knowledge test that the Heart Association does not have at all).

    Clearly the Heart Association and the Red Cross (at least as I remember it) have vastly differing approaches to learning this.  On the other hand, the Red Cross class I took was for people who were expected to react instantly and to get it right the first time (lifeguards, firefighters, etc.) while the Heart Association class was really for foster parents and day care providers for whom, while the knowledge is important, what is needed first and foremost is enough knowledge to give them confidence so that they can provide care and call for professional care. After teaching for the Red Cross for more than two decades, my wife was unimpressed but I suppose both approaches are valid and have their place.

    In any case, our task for now is to turn in proof that we took the classes and then wait for our fire inspection in two weeks.  After that we're done and we wait some more for our new therapeutic foster home license to be approved.

Family Meetings and More Classes

    A week or two ago we had a family meeting to talk about Foster Care and adoption.  I had downloaded a blog (I can't remember where I got it now but probably from the Twitter feed from www.adoptuskids.org or adoptivefamilies.com) that listed things that you should talk about before bringing new kids into your house and into your family.  Our kids knew a lot of the things we talked about just because we've talked about it before and because they've been dealing with some of the same (post-adoption) issues themselves.  Naturally, our children think that our family is okay the way it is and they aren't fond of the idea of introducing more chaos to our house just when things seemed to be finally calming down a bit.    They do, however, accept that it is our decision to make and they trust that we love them and have the best interests of everyone in mind.

    One great question was how we could afford to have more children, particularly because they think that we are poor.  We really aren't poor although we are far from rich.  I left a better paying career some years ago to follow a calling that I felt on my life and while we get by on what I earn, we don't buy a lot of the toys that our friends have and our kids don't have all the things that their friends have.  Sometimes this is because we truly can't afford it, but often it is because we've chosen to live more simply.  Even so, how we will ever pay for college tuition is something of a mystery.  If all three of our children decide to pursue higher education, we will at some point have all of them in college at the same time.  At that point, the cost of tuition, even in a state university, will be more than my annual salary.  Our kids know that their choice of colleges will ultimately have less to do with preference and far more to do with affordability and financial aid packages.  While we know that foster kids come with a monthly stipend, we began this process with adoption in mind and have never considered this as a long-term source of income.

    Meanwhile, we have one more set of classes to take to complete our application to upgrade our foster care license.  Today and tomorrow we will take First Aid and CPR classes and then, in a couple weeks we will have our new fire inspection.  At that point we will be done and the paperwork submitted to the State of Ohio.  I was told recently that we should expect the licensing process to take about four weeks.