Here's To Hope: Foster Care & Adoption

I guess you could say I have the "night before jitters" right now, but really the biggest thought going through my head is what to wear tomorrow.

10 months ago when we started our journey to do foster care, I never imagined being is this situation so soon. We had truly been blessed. When Pretty Princess came into our home, it was a unique placement that was really only suppose to be short term. There was a family of three children that needed a home, but the age range from the oldest two to the baby was 12 years. It is hard to find homes sometimes for teenagers, but add a baby to the mix and it is nearly impossible to keep from being moved around a lot...which these kids were. Before PP was brought into our home, she and her siblings were in the system for 5 months and had been in three different homes. My neighbor, who also does foster care, called me shortly after we had finished the classes and asked if we would be interested in taking in a 6 month old baby girl. She wanted to take in the older kids, and since we only live about two houses away, it was a perfect situation. We got the baby, she got the teenagers, and they would be close enough to always spend time together and create a bond.....from the very get go it was a short term placement and so we tried to avoid creating a strong bond because we knew we wouldn't have her long. Month after month the news kept changing, everything was unclear and frustrations brewed.

The last 10 months have been pretty crazy, I mean seriously when you have two children only three months apart and they both under 2, yowzers! There have been and still are days where I think I am crazy, where I wonder how I could ever possibly add another baby to the mix someday...but of course there are days, more than not, where I am so amazed by the blessings that have been brought into our lives, when I just smile and soak up the fact that 19 months ago we had nothing but heartache and hope to adopt, and here we are with two beautiful children to love and call ours forever! Hope is there to cling to, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise!

The thing that I have been pondering the most about today was how different life is at this very moment then even three months ago. Let's take a stroll down memory lane... (August - September 2009) We had been contacted by a birthmother who was expecting a baby due in April. She was friends with our son's birthmom and asked us to take her baby. We were exstatic...EXSTATIC! It seemed like a miracle. One we had been praying for and hoping for. During this same time, we learned that the possibility of adopting PP was growing more and more. Countless hours were spent talking, praying and seeking for guidance. We couldn't support three children under the age of two. We wanted more children, but felt like we were way in over our heads. We spoke to family and friends, hoping to get a little advise to lift an almost unimaginable burden. We decided that we would adopt both PP and the new baby, but that we would call it quits and so I scheduled a hysterectomy. (October 2009) Three days before my scheduled surgery we found out I was pregnant. A MIRACLE, literally. Everything took a huge turn...our plans altered completely. We spoke with our potential birthmother, introduced her to my sister-in-law who was and still is looking to adopt and hope for the best in the end. It was so hard to let this birthmother go, but we knew it was meant to be. I was pregnant...life was AMAZING. Two weeks later I lost the baby. Devastation, heartache, pain I can never even explain was felt.

(If you go in the archives November 2009 you can read about it)

All the while, PP was getting closer and closer to being able to adopt. About two weeks after I lost my baby, our sweet birthmother went into preterm labor and also lost hers. Things were so confusing...everything seems like a blurr and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make sense of any of it. I came away from all that knowing that there is a purpose and a plan for our lives and that we all need to have more faith and more patience in understanding the unknown.

Can you see how my life went from crazy to amazing to crazy, no wonder why I am in funks! haha

Anyway, in December, as a family, we tried to love what we knew we had, and that was a beautiful son and an amazing, sweet and adorable baby girl. All the while, I was still attending numerous meetings about our adoption case, struggling to accept the notion that PP could end up going back with her bio-mother. Prayers, faith and more prayers were said that the best thing would come to pass for both us, PP, and her family. Now we are in January 2010...the state had placed a termination hearing on PP's bio-mom. The charge was abandonment and the state was doing everything in their power to make sure that PP was going to have a positive life. (That hearing was suppose to be tomorrow)

The thing about foster care is that you are so emotionally and physically invested in the children you care for that the idea of them being taken from your home and put back into a situation where things may not turn out so well for them is just devastating to think about. It happens, far too often, and as foster parents, you have literally no say as to what you think is best for the child. It is a very tough thing to do, I will not deny that EVER. I hope to be able to do foster care again sometime in the future, but what I have learned in the short while that we have done this is that hoping for a positive experience and an adoption of a child placed in your home is the hardest way to obtain a family if you are seeking to build one. Being so emotinally tied to the children that come and go is not how I picture building my family. We have been blessed. No doubt about it. Our first placement EVER and we get to adopt her...a true miracle and blessing. One of my dear friends here has been doing foster care for almost 9 years...out of those 9 years and always having foster kids in her home, she has only been able to adopt 2 of them. That is typical. See how blessed we really truly are?
I think once I am in my 30's and have established my family, I will open my doors again to fostering. It is such a great blessing to those children who need love and compassion...but the proper mindset has to accompany the desire to do it. I honestly know that someday again we will do foster care, but for now, it is too straining on our family...We said that after PP's case, no matter if we were able to adopt her or not, that we wouldn't continue doing foster care at this point in time in our lives.

Two weeks ago I was crying in fear of losing our sweet precious baby girl...two days ago I got that call that PP's Bio-mom had agreed to relinquish her rights and give us the opportunity to adopt her. How grateful I am to her and her desire to give PP the best life possible...one that we will be able to provide for her. I mentioned before that PP has two older "half-siblings" in the system as well...light is shinning on them as well because the oldest (16yrs) is getting guardianship granted to her to live with her current foster family, and 13 year old is going to return to live with his mom again.

Tomorrow we will know more....but as of right now, we are hoping to finalize the adoption by June!