Foster-to-adopt?

We are officially licensed! Yay! The process to become licensed has been long and we have not been very patient- at all. To start the process we attended an informational meeting at Hope and Home (hopeandhome.org), the agency we are currently licensed through, at the end of October. Wow! What an amazing place! We received a tour of the building which is so homey and welcoming. Right when you walk in you are welcomed with smiles and a barista bar! The walls are covered in murals depicting the location of Venice. They have a large play room for supervised visits with bio parents, a full kitchen, and multiple rooms all purposed to serve the needs of the children, bio parents, and foster parents. Anyway...we were then asked a series of questions like, why we are interested in foster care, a little bit about our background, and things we like to do. Next we were shown a video about a family and their first placement of three boys and how they adopted them. Lets just say there were a lot of tears and at the end of the video we were like, sign us up! To finish the tour we were told we could start training on Friday, which was in three days!!!

The training was one month long with classes every tuesday and thursday for three hours. Along with one eight hour saturday. The training was amazing, but honestly could not possibly prepare you for the reality of what is foster care. They taught a lot on attachment and loss, parenting with grace and love, and the types of children and reasons why they come into care. The later was one of the hardest classes. The real life images of abused children and the conditions from which they were removed were hard to see. It was such a shock to know that these things are happening to the children in our country, in our town, in our neighborhood! But to hear the stories of where these children are now and how they've been saved is so redeeming.

After the training is over there is a ton of paper work. It really never ends. You thought there was a lot of paperwork when buying a house? Well that's nothing! Then comes the waiting...the background checks. Oh man. This is where we were extremely inpatient and frustrated. We turned in our background paper work in the middle of November and our background check didn't come back until April 4th! Five months! But along with the call that we were licensed, came a call for three boys! Six, three, and 10 months! We were so overwhelmed that we had to pass. And here's where the emotional roller coaster starts. The anxiety, the guilt, and then the relief that they found a good home.

So here we are after all of this waiting, waiting some more...