First of all, let me tell a little bit about myself. I have been married for 9 years to a great guy, Nathan. We have built quite a life together. We have 2 beautiful daughters, Addison and Hannah,who are 5 and 7, two sweet doggies, about 15 fish, oh yeah .... and we are foster parents. We became licenced foster parents in January 2011 through our state. We were licensed for two additional children (so 4 total counting our daughters). We got into this whole foster thing because we wanted to grow our family through adoption. Adoption has been something that has always been on my heart for as long as I can remember. My plan was to have a mixture of biological and adopted children in my family. I don't remember having a total number I wanted to have, but I knew I wanted more than 2 and less than 10! I am so thankful that my husband shared this desire to bring adopted children into our family.
So, we became licensed this past January. Let me explain a little bit about that process. In October 2010, I couldn't wait any longer to start the process that would bring our next child home. That feeling that another child was out there for us was weaseling its way into my mind more and more frequently. Nathan and I had talked at great length about things and had even discussed it with our girls. We were all in agreement, it was time for our family to grow. Because I have wanted to adopt for quite some time, I had done some research on the whole process. I became pretty familiar with our state's adoption website, bookmarked it on my computer, and checked it frequently. So, when the time was finally right and Nathan gave me the OK, I knew exactly who to contact to get the process started. I made the call to the local Department of Children's Services office and spoke with the nicest man. He set up a time for me to come in and I couldn't wait for that meeting! We met a few days later and he gave me a huge packet of paperwork to fill out. I went home and started right away. Nathan and I both had portions to complete and we got it finished in about a week. When I went back to DCS to drop off the completed packet, that nice man assumed I was there to ask some questions. He couldn't believe we had everything finished. He informed me that we had returned the packet in record time.
So the next steps were to complete a homestudy (which is a bunch of intrusive and personal questions about our life and relationships and an interview and home inspection completed by a caseworker), and complete foster care classes. We both enjoyed the classes, they consisted of 3 all day Saturday classes where we learned about several things. The classes covered the foster care system, issues foster parents were likely to run into, rules of being a foster parent, child development, etc. We both felt like we learned a great deal and our eyes were definetly opened to things we had never even thought about before. Our caseworker came out and looked our house over to make sure we had heat, running water, no lead paint, etc. It was a pretty basic checklist she went through. Then she proceeded on to the intrusive questions (which really weren't that bad) and talked briefly to our girls. And our homestudy was complete. It was a basically painless process. The whole thing was done and approved pretty quickly.
So, the wait began.........
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