It's been a week and a half of craziness. I am so drained. I am so pent up. I am ready to explode with chattiness to someone for 3 hours to tell all that has happened. I am... I am all over the place. I don't even know what to say I am. Now what in the world do I zoom in to focus on in this post... Well most of you on here are in the infertility community so I guess I'll start with foster care type stuff and maybe I'll focus in on something else later in a different post.
Last Thursday we had our in home consultation with a lady from DCFS. She pretty much just came over with some paperwork for us to fill out to get us started down the road to foster care/adoption. I'm actually kind of annoyed about it. I copied a couple of the papers she checked off a bunch of stuff on about our house that needed a few more things checked off before our house would be approved for foster care. I copied it so that I would know what all we still needed to get done. Anyways, there were things she checked off about our home she couldn't possibly have known because she didn't really look at our house. She was in a rush because her daughter was having a birthday party that evening and she wanted to be home in time. It was very quick. She didn't really seem to want to have any kind of conversation. I would mention the big family I came from... she didn't care. I would mention how much we hope to adopt a little kid through this... she just went on reading the paperwork in front of her. I'm expecting she'll want a tour of our house, she just wanted a peek in our spare bedrooms to see how big they were so she could mark down how many kids our house could hold. From the things she wrote down, I think us and our house left a good impression on the DCFS lady, but she didn't leave a very good impression on me. Maybe I shouldn't have expected so much, but I felt her visit was very impersonal, and didn't feel at ease afterwords.
Fast forward to Saturday. On Saturday we went down for Jared's cousin's wedding. To avoid showing up to the wedding late, we planned to get there half an hour early and visit with some family before the wedding started. We made it half an hour early as planned! But when we got there we didn't see any family right away. Walking past Rob's office, Rob saw us and said "Hey something with your names on it crossed my desk earlier this week.". YAY!!! Ok sorry for that burst of excitement, let me rewind a bit and tell you who Rob is.
Rob is a friend of the family and the minister at the church Jared's grandma Marilyn goes to. I don't know how many weddings and funerals this man has performed for our family, but he's been there for us through a lot. It was brought to our attention not all that long ago that Rob does home studies and such and that he has an adopted kid and might be able to help us out. Rob lives about an hour away and we didn't know if he'd be able to help us out or not, so we had not contacted him. We really haven't told many people about us trying to become foster parents yet, maybe we figured we'd mention it to him after the news got out more, I don't know. Anyways...
We went into Rob's office and talked to him for 20 minutes or more about foster care and adoption. It was wonderful! He does foster training classes and said he often does some up in our area during the summer! He does indeed do home studies and I hope he will end up doing ours. Whether he does or not knowing that our names came across his desk means that right from the beginning someone we know will be a part of our foster care/ adoption whatever story. Rob is someone I feel would recommend us, and he could very well be a part of our case. I am so excited. He just sat there and talked to us as a friend about the whole foster care and adoption stuff. He is excited for us going down this road. He thinks our young age will be to our advantage. He answered some questions we had. I just.... I don't know. It was encouraging. He told us about several people he knows who adopted through fostering. He seems to think this will be a great opportunity for us. His son he didn't foster before adopting him and says he wished he had done so and gotten to know him sooner. He knows the risk of fostering means possibly getting attached to a child and then not getting to keep them, but he thinks it is well worth the risk. Our conversation with Rob Saturday was a blessing and I think God set that meeting up for us. =)
After the wedding we learned of some drama going on that involves some young cousins of ours that have been taken away from their parents. The oldest of the kids is a 6 year old girl named Brooklyn who is actually Jared's goddaughter. There is a hearing today for whether or not they should have been taken away from the home, and another court date later this month that I think is supposed to decide where the kids will go. I don't know if the kids will end up in the foster system or not, I don't know if we are meant to be foster parents; but if we are, and if they do, we plan on finding out if those kids can have us as their foster home. Part of me really hopes that we can be the ones to rescue those kids from the situation they are in and give them a loving home. But another part of me is scared of filling our house with two or three kids that I'm sure we'll never be able to adopt.
The ideal picture I had of becoming foster parents was to take in just one little kid who we could raise and hopefully call our own some day. I'm scared to lose that foster dream. I'm scared to throw aside all my new found dreams of adopting a little boy or girl. But those little cousins of ours? If we have the opportunity to take them in, we will. I've wished we could take them in before, but it was never any kind of option before, and now that it might be....
As always I'm getting ahead of myself. We don't know if that'll even end up being an option after all. I'm worrying once again about the future instead of focusing on the present. Please say a prayer for those cousins, may God put them wherever is best for them.