Here We Go Again...

   Our temporary placement that I mentioned in my last post was supposed to last for three days.  At first it seemed that the agencies involved wanted the existing foster home to reconsider, but when that wasn't possible, they frittered around long enough to make us wonder if they were trying to persuade us to take her permanently.  For a variety of reasons, that just wasn't possible.  They did finally find a more permanent solution but only after they were closing in on three weeks (instead of three days) and only after my wife made it very clear that our schedule made it impossible for us to keep her any longer.

   Then a little more than a week ago, we heard that another placement was possible and asked if we might be interested.  This time a school aged boy a bit younger than our kids.  We didn't get a lot of information at first because he was not a part of our agency but to one of the local county agencies.  As we learned more about his background we became more willing to consider it and so, starting with a one-day "trial", last week we began a new long-term placement.  Things are going reasonably well so far, but that is not to say that there has not been some friction.  Another person in the house changes many things and not all of us deal with change in the same way.  There are loner lines for the bathroom in the morning, our schedules are different, there is one more person for whom to organize care, doctor visits, prescriptions, etc.  I am certain that his stress is spiking as well as he moves to a new foster home and a new school and tries to learn new rules and adapt to new family customs and values.  All in all, none of this was unexpected but, at the same time, is a source of stress for many family members.  For this to happen in the middle of the Christmas season hasn't made things any easier.  I hope (and I believe) that things will settle down in a few weeks as we grow accustomed to one another and to our new routines.

First (Temporary) Placement

    It’s been too long (again) since I posted an update here.  For the last few weeks we have just been plain busy.  Patti has been preparing for, and then actually being a part of, a weekend of Kairos prison ministry at the Northeast Pre-Release Center, a women’s prison in Cleveland and, as always, there is a lot going on at church.  During this time, we also continued to work on our Aunt’s house and have moved some of her furniture to our house.  Moving furniture, particularly beds and dressers is the biggest part of what we had left on our “to do” list before we felt ready to accept a placement.

    

    A few weeks ago, we discovered that we were ready before we knew we were ready.  Knowing that we were very close, one of the folks from Guidestone called us and asked if we would consider taking in two boys from a neighboring county.  We agreed to talk about it, but at our next training meeting a few days later we discovered that as soon as we had said we were willing to talk, they had submitted our file to the county for consideration.  Nothing ever really came of it, but we realized that we were ready.  

    Then last week it happened.  A Guidestone foster parent had some trouble with a high school aged girl that had been living with her.  We knew them both and they knew us so, at least in the short term, Guidestone asked if she could come to our home for a few days of respite care while they searched for a new, more permanent, placement.  We said yes.  The girl was supposed to stay with us for just two or three days but we are already approaching a week.  Everything has gone fairly well so far.  The worst part for us has been that her schedule is dramatically different than ours of our children’s so it has been something of a challenge for one of us to be around when she is home.  Today she is meeting with her county social worker so things may change but we don’t yet know what will happen or when.

    I suppose this means we should also finish up that last bit of paperwork too…

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.

There's a finish line around here somewhere... I think.

    Well, last week we finally heard that our license had finally transferred from Belmont County to out new agency, Guidestone.  We still don't really know for sure if our license 'upgrade' from 'foster home' to 'therapeutic foster home' has been accomplished or not.  I really need to ask our contact at the agency again when we see her.

   You would think that we would be more insistent that this get squared away but right now our summer schedule is booked solid.  We've thought about getting a new dog and have put that off until fall (at least) and there is really no way that we could squeeze in plans for an extra family member at this point.  Our hope now is to get all the paperwork completed, T's crossed and I's dotted, over the summer so that we will be ready to accept a placement in late summer or fall.

    Meanwhile, I've begun to occasionally look at the children (and their biographies) on AdoptUSKids.org again.  It breaks my heart to see all these kids without parents.  Sometimes you just want to take them all but there are just so many...

    One more thing, two weeks ago we attended some additional foster parent training that was put on by the Cuyahoga County department of Children's Services.  While there we attended a session that was taught by Detective Bobby Grizzard.  It was excellent and frightening at the same time.  I am hoping to have Detective Grizzard do similar presentation at our church, both for the community and for our youth.  You can find my thoughts on his presentation here: Sexual Predators: the Hunters and the Hunted.

Everything is Done... Except the Waiting.

   We got word on Wednesday of last week that our agency had finally made contact with the last of our references and all the paperwork was then forwarded upstream.  What that means for us I'm not exactly sure.  Does that mean that our file has not yet been sent to, and reviewed by, the folks in Columbus who will, ultimately, have to issue our new foster home license?  Is Columbus already done and now we are only waiting on our agency to dot the "i"'s and cross the "t"'s?  Does that mean we will have our license this month or a month from now?  Honestly, I am utterly clueless.  All I know is that we will continue waiting.

   When we finally decided that the time was right to begin the process of another adoption from foster care, we knew that it would require classes and training, a new homestudy and all that goes with it.  We've been down that road before and much of it is familiar territory.  The weird part of this was, and is, how messed up the whole thing became when we found out we were moving.  Don't get me wrong, this had been a great move for us.  We love where we are, the church where I serve, the school that our kids attend, and the people that we live and work with.  We just never expected that transferring our homestudy to a new house (which is what we thought was going to happen) would take as long as it has.  Here we are, eight months later, and we still don't even have our license, let alone a placement.  Heck, without the license, we can't even be too serious about looking through the listings on AdoptUSkids.org. 

    I'm not blaming anyone.  It wasn't any one person's (or agency's) fault.  I know that the delays are an accumulation of choices that we made, as well as the choices of our new county and our new agency.  Moving delayed things.  Deciding we didn't like the county agency in out new residence delayed things.  Moving to a new agency and upgrading our license delayed things.  And on top of that, we lived through the loss of our Aunt Gladys who, generously, left us an inheritance.  Her gift to us is a fabulous blessing (of that I have no doubt) but the time we have needed, and will need for the next several months, to handle her estate, home and belongings, makes it somewhere between difficult and impossible to accept a placement right now, even if one were available.

We're hoping that life will calm down toward the end of summer and we will be ready for a placement.  Will one be available?  Will our agency need us to do respite care for someone amidst the chaos that is our summer?  Will a placement be available when we're finally ready?  To these questions, and others, my only answer is, "Who knows?"  In truth, we will do as we have always done.  We will continue to lean on, and trust, the wisdom and love that God has for us.  It's our lives, but it's his plan.

Meanwhile... we wait.

Frustration

I haven't written anything for a while because I fully expected that I would be writing about the approval of our new homestudy and foster care license.  Apparently, that was not to be.  Through much of our process we have been just a few weeks behind Julia, another foster parent with whom we took some of our last classes.  Julia received her approval in December and already has had a child placed in her home.

We're still waiting.

We're not sure, at this point, if the state is holding things up for some reason (or for no reason), or if someone has made an error at our agency.  Only last week we received and email from Guidestone asking for additional contact information for one of our references.  Apparently, they were still checking our references months after we expected that they had finished.  Does that mean that they haven't even submitted the paperwork to the state or is this something that they always expected to be doing in parallel to whatever is supposed to happen in Columbus?  Honestly, I'm not sure.  All I know is that this is all taking longer than it was supposed to take and, even longer than I, in my most pessimistic thoughts, had anticipated.

Color me frustrated.

Still Waiting

    I had hoped, by this time, to announce that we had received our updated foster care license, but that still hasn't happened.  Several weeks ago we sat with our friend Julia in a training session with our agency, Guidestone, and a roomful of other foster parents.  Julia has consistently been a few weeks ahead of us in "the process" and had, at that time, just received her state-approved license.  Since we submitted our homestudy and other documentation only a few weeks after Julia, we expected that we would hear about our approval by now.  Nope.

In the beginning, I started this blog in an open forum.  I intended for it to be a journal of one family's journey through "the process."  I started anonymously in the event that people I knew might stumble upon it.  Later, through carelessness, I posted from my regular account instead of through my new "Anonymous Dad" account.  When I discovered my mistake I realized that since almost no one was really reading my postings the risk of discovery was low so I didn't bother deleting them and re-posting from the other account.  Still, even this far into the process, we haven't told our families that we are doing this.  At this point there really isn't a good reason other than we haven't thought of a way to do it and it hasn't ever felt like the "right" time.  At  the moment we are thinking that we will tell them when our license arrives.  If we don't we will run the very real risk of explaining it to them after a child has come to live with us.  I expect that would be rather awkward.

We are still looking at the bedrooms in our house and thinking about how we could arrange furniture and where we could put beds so that no one tries to hang from the ceiling fans but, for now we are...

...still waiting.

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.

The End is Near?

As of now, our list of things needed to finish upgrading our license is getting pretty short.  We have finished the necessary classroom hours for training and all that remains is to get fingerprinted (again), get a fire inspection of our home, and take a first aid and CPR class.

I smile when I think of taking the first aid and CPR class because for many years of our marriage, my wife was my instructor.  For more than twenty years, my wife was a Red Cross instructor for Swimming, Lifeguarding, and Water Safety Instruction, as well as for First Aid and CPR.  For a number of years after we were married, I was a certified lifeguard and so I was required to take an annual re-certification for First Aid and CPR.  It's been a few years and I know that they have changed a few things, but I am genuinely looking forward to taking it.  Our only 'problem' is that with our current schedules and our children's schedules for band and sports, we can't find a class that will work for us until min-November.

Stay tuned.

Classes... again.

Spent a good portion of the day yesterday in a training seminar to upgrade our foster care license.  Interesting stuff and great to meet new foster-parents-in-training.  Making connections is always good so that you have someone to call when you need help.  If you are unfamiliar with foster parenting, what I mean is, foster children are not like your own.  As a foster-parent, you are licensed by the state to care for these kids and if you need to go somewhere and are unable to take your kids with you (say, the hospital or to see a sick relative) you can't just drop them off at your sister's house or even at your mom's.  Responsible adults like your sister and your mom (assuming they are as responsible as you and you'd trust them) can be listed as alternative care givers under certain circumstances, but unless they get their home inspected by the social workers and have a fire inspection like you did for your house, they would have to watch your foster children in your house.

That isn't going to work all that often.

As a result, it is good to make friends with other foster parents whose homes have been inspected and certified.  Then, in a pinch, you can watch their kids or they can watch yours and, as long as the agency is properly informed (know the rules of your county or agency), you're good to go.

Another Meeting and a New Direction

    At the end of last week we met with two fine folks from Guidestone, one we had met before and the other, a supervisor, was new to us.  During our discussion we determined that the types of children and level of disability that we had specified in our original application to Belmont County were acceptable to Guidestone and they felt that they had children in their care that would fit that description.  This was important to both of us but especially to me because I didn’t want to feel pressured to take in children that were more difficult than we had planned.    With this understanding we felt that we should continue toward our re-certification with Guidestone.

    Despite our new understanding regarding the type of children that we could expect, there was one new wrinkle.  Local county agencies refer children to Guidestone when they have children that are technically “more difficult.”   Although this still fits our original description, we now will have to upgrade our foster home certification to be a “therapeutic foster home” instead of a “family foster home.”  What that means is another twenty hours of training.   

Yippee…

Not much to report today except that the new agency that we are considering, Guidestone, has received copies of all of our paperwork from Belmont County (at least as much as they are allowed to copy) and is will be visiting us later this week.  I guess we'll see how many thing will need to be re-done and if that list is longer or shorter than the list that we had from Stark County.  The process is taking longer than I thought that it would but on the other hand, my pessimistic side suspected that moving would throw a wrench into the works and might take six months to work out.  Still, even then I though that it might be six months before we had a child placed in our home, not that it would take six months to satisfy the paper tigers.

Hopefully, I will have more news next week...

First Impressions

    It’s been too long since I wrote anything here.  A couple weeks ago we attended a training session mandated by our new county.  Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I had expected.  The staff and the other families were as nice as I anyone could have asked for, but that wasn’t really the problem.  If we back up another week we encounter the problem.  Before we left Belmont County we completed all of the training required by them and by the State of Ohio and were certified as foster parents.  We understood that, since we would be in a new home, we would need to have another home visit and another fire inspection.  The problem is that when we contacted our new county agency, we were told that we would also have to take several additional classes, rewrite our home-study and provide copies of the home-studies that were done for our first two adoptions thirteen and fifteen years ago. 

    We’ve all heard about first impressions and these were not good ones.  We weren’t too happy about some of the new requirements and wished them luck with the last one.  We sure don’t have copies of our old home-studies (or if we do they are buried so deep in our box pile they may not be found until our children go sort through our stuff when they put me in a nursing home), I’m not sure the agencies that wrote them retain records that long, and at least one of the social workers that wrote them died ten years ago.

   As I said, we went to the first class the new agency required and it wasn’t bad.  It was all about the rules they expected us to follow.  Many rules were the same as Belmont County, some were new and a few were just explained better.  Some of the things that we learned weren’t especially welcome.  The county was fairly clear that although you have the chance to express your preferences, when they select you for a particular foster child you may not get the chance to review their file first and it would count against you (as in, it would impact your ability to be offered foster children in the future) if you refused a child that was offered.  One other item did not go over especially well with us.  Our new county requires an exclusivity agreement.  If anyone is certified by them they insist upon exclusive “rights” to them as foster parents for a minimum of one year.  If you choose to change agencies in less than one year, the (taxpayer supported, public) agency will bill you for the expenses they incurred in getting your certification.  We thought this was unusual and we mentioned it to a couple other social workers that we know.  Neither had ever heard of such a thing.  Again, not a great first impression.

    Surprisingly, at the same time that we were discussing these negative first impressions, I had a surprise visitor at my office at church.  A representative from Guidestone, a private foster care/adoption agency stopped by the church to meet the new pastor (me) and to see if she could come and speak for a few minutes about their agency some Sunday morning.  Since Guidestone is essentially an agency of the United Methodist Church, this was a reasonable request.  The surprising thing was the timing.  My wife and I had already discussed the possibility of meeting with them to discuss options particularly because of our first impressions at our county agency.  The end result has been that we’ve deliberately slowed the pace of re-certification with the county (since we don’t want to have to pay them for their services if we choose to go elsewhere) and we are looking more deeply into what it would take to re-certify with Guidestone instead.

    All in all, the process is taking longer than we thought it would, is more difficult that it ought to be, and now we are not so sure that foster care is something we want to pursue long-term.  Instead we are feeling that foster-to-adopt as a deliberate path to adoption may be the best course for us.   The adventure continues…

Pre-Service Completed (honest!)

    This past Thursday my wife and I traveled several counties over to take our last pre-service class.  During the classes offered in our own county, we celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary and had planned a short get-a-way together.  As a result, we missed one class and had to attend a make-up class with another county.  As we often do, we planned our route using Yahoo! Maps.  Normally this map program seriously overestimates how long it will take to travel but even so we added an extra half-hour to be sure we would be on time.  We stopped only once for fuel and to grab a hot dog (also at the gas station) but somehow still managed to find ourselves running late.  We did manage to make it to class within the required window (you can only miss 15 minutes of the class in order to be counted for attendance).

    The class that we attended was on Preventing and De-escalating Crisis (session 6).  The class was very informative and we were impressed by the instructor and appreciated her personal experiences adopting from the Foster System.  We also found something more unexpected.  As I noted earlier, we had made friends with the folks with whom we had spent seven weeks with in class but we really anticipated that for this make-up, we would just sort of drop in and take off.  Instead, what we found was another class full of folks who, though very different from one another and who were there for a variety of reasons, were still connected through a common bond of their love for children and the desire to make a difference.  On top of that, before we left, we made another friend or two.  During the class and afterward, we found ourselves in conversation with another couple.  While we had thought that everyone would leave after the class was over, this couple wanted to continue to talk and get to know one another better.

    We have also made a call to our social worker at Jobs and Family Services and let her know that we have completed the pre-service training.  With that step behind us, she is now planning our home visits and some additional paperwork (physical forms, vet forms for the pets, etc) so that she will be able to finish our home study before July.  My wife and I are still somewhat unsure of where this new adventure will lead us.  We began thinking that we only wanted to consider adoption but now that we have taken the classes and learned so much (both from the instructors and from the other parents) we are planning to be certified as foster parents as well.  I remain a little uncertain about how we will do in the long-term.  I have no doubt that we have something to contribute, that our family can make room for a few more and that we have enough love to share nor do I have any doubt that we can make a difference in the life of a child.  My only doubts are how we will be able to hold up when a child we have cared for is allowed to return home to his (or her) birth-parents.  I suppose that there will be a joy in seeing a family reunited, but what feelings of loss will we feel as well?

    Please pray with us as we consider where God might be leading in this new adventure.