It has been nearly a year and a half since my last post. I debated whether I would keep this blog open or start a whole new one. Life has taken a few drastic turns and it is very different now. However, we are still "Building our Kingdom" so ultimately I have decided to continue this blog.
October 2019 General Conference for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
I don't remember what exactly was said. I do however remember an overwhelming feeling listening to those sessions that told me "Forget about trying to get pregnant. You need to do foster care." The impression took me by surprise. Why me? Surely there are many other more qualified candidates for the title of "foster mom", people with more experience raising children and more educated on dealing with kids from trauma. I didn't want troubled children. I wanted a baby. My baby. I didn't feel like it was fair that because I couldn't have children of my own, I had to babysit those who had children but didn't want to care for them.
Knowing that our Father in Heaven has a plan and his is greater than mine I made a phone call that Monday morning before I could talk myself out of it and thus began our foster care journey.
The Licensing Process
That Monday morning we contacted our local foster care agency. From there we set an appointment for an agency representative to come talk to us in our home. She explained the process. What we needed to do to get licensed and how to prepare for our home study. She left us with a business card, a thick stack of paperwork, and a date we had registered to start the required classes. It was slightly overwhelming.
We took this one day at a time. We went to our classes while both working full time. They were full of good general parenting information as well as trauma informed parenting information. There were stories that tugged at your heart strings as stories about difficult behaviors that scared the crap out of me. We had a list of resources and books to read. We finished our classes after about a month and a half and immediately got sent for background checks, fingerprinting, and to anxiously await the dreaded home study.
Preparing for the home study was a lot easier than I had anticipated. My home is my safe place and allowing strangers into our home was not easy for me. Our licensing specialist made it as comfortable as possible. Aside from inspecting our home and telling us what we needed to fix to make it safer for the child, they asked us a lot of questions about our childhood and our experiences. As well as what kinds of children we were willing to take and if we were willing to take sibling groups. At that moment I felt like that was our purpose in all of this. To take sibling groups and keep siblings together.
Once everything was approved we were assigned a Resource Family Consultant (RFC), a social worker assigned to our family to help ensure that our needs are taken care of and to advocate for us in the case.
Now the only thing left to do was wait for a placement call.
