Now it's Our Fault

Well, now the shoe is on the other foot.

    For months we were waiting for paperwork to wind its way through the halls of bureaucracy somewhere, but, as I noted a few weeks ago, we finally had the official piece of paper.  Now, we have had a couple email exchanges and a phone call with folks at our agency, Guidestone, who want us to meet and discuss what sorts of children we are able to parent, as in what sorts of disabilities we can cope with, and so on.  the problem at the moment is not the agency, or the county or the state.  It's us.  We knew that we were almost ready months ago but then we inherited a house full of furniture from our aunt and we've spent nearly every weekend there, cleaning and repairing things. 

    Part of our being "almost ready" has been that we had room for new kids but not necessarily beds.  Since each of our kids had their own room (this is the first house we've lived in where they could do that), our plan was to add one more bed to each room.  To do that we needed to buy a new mattress for our bunk beds but we needed one more bed as well.  Since we inherited our aunt's furniture we thought it would be a shame to sell off her nice beds and keep some of the cheap beds we bought when out kids were younger.  That meant cleaning at Aunt Gladys' house had to reach a point where we could get beds out of her house and moved to ours.  As of this week we're nearly there.  One bed was moved a couple weeks ago and a second one moved this past weekend.  Now we need a new mattress for the new bed and the bunk bed and we're almost there (our children have some major room cleaning to do, so we will have to find ways to, um, motivate them properly).  After that, the only thing left is for us to fill out one more form (the one where we sort out what we can cope with) and we're there.

We originally thought that we'd get this all done in time for the new school year to start, but obviously,  we were a little overly optimistic.

The other weird part is that we still haven't managed to tell our parents about all this.  We might just end up breaking it to them when we introduce our new (foster) children to them. 

That could be interesting.

Still waiting, but...

    Well, there isn't much to report except that a few weeks back we finally got a piece of paper that said we had finally received our license as a therapeutic foster home. Beyond that, nothing has happened.  On the other hand, we told the folks at Guidestone that we would not be able to accept a placement during the summer while our family was traveling for vacation, church camps, and other activities.  As of now, with the start of marching band season and cross country season, we are still running but are now staying pretty close to home.  I let our liaison at Guidestone know that we were home, but maybe it just hasn't sunk in yet.  In any case, we're still waiting.