It's been a while, but we are so excited to start sharing an exciting journey with you! See, fostering is something that we have talked about for a long time. We always said that it would be hard to love them and lose them. We also said we'd probably do it after we had more kids of our own and they were older. I'm going to share a brief (super brief) snapshot of our journey from inquiry to approval.
Sometime in early 2017, a friend (who was already a foster parent) shared a couple of things about foster care. First, she shared the numbers for our county. At the time, we had less than 20 DFCS foster homes and nearly 200 children in our county that were in state custody. Later, she shared a post that was basically "If you've ever said _____ about becoming a foster parent, you'd be perfect" and it was a list of 3-5 bullet points. We realized then that it wasn't about how much it would hurt us when they left, it's more about the love we can give them while they're with us. That's when we decided to find out more about the process.
On May 15, 2017, we attended a prospective foster parent information meeting. It was a brief session where they told us what we could expect of the process and more about the need in our county. We were able to complete our IMPACT pre-service training classes in June 2017. All that left was finishing up the paperwork and home visits.
We finished up all of our visits in late fall and had our last bit of paperwork submitted in early January. The sub-contractor that wrote our home study report submitted it to our county DFCS at the end of January. Now it was time for three people to review the home study and gives us the final decision. Our case manager had to come out and take a few more pictures of the house per her supervisor's request. Then just more waiting.
After nearly eleven months after we started the process, we received the call on April 9, 2018 (two weeks ago) that we were approved. Our case manager said that our new case manager would be reaching out soon to set up a transition meeting so that we could begin accepting placements. Receiving that call brought so many emotions. We had waited for this, and now the time was finally here!
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