Hellobee

It’s official. We are licensed foster moms! What a whirlwind. I’ll start from where my last foster care post left off. After our successful home inspection and our shopping trip, we set up the nursery and waited. And waited. And waited. It was the holidays and we were busy, but we didn’t hear from anyone at the foster agency for over a month. I checked in a few times to make sure we stayed on their radar and it seemed that everything was fine, just moving slowly because of the holidays. Fair enough.

I knew I would be out of town for a week in January, so I made sure to alert our social worker to the dates I’d be gone. I didn’t want her call the day before I left to schedule our final visit, only to have to put her off. We thought it was a good possibility that we might be called the week before I left, so we cleaned house, straightened up our hay stack and reorganized our pump house (it’s very small, and doubles as my milking parlor, so it gets full and messy very quickly!).

Sure enough, we got a call the Wednesday before I left town. Could we meet the next day in the office? Sure, no problem. Another call. Sorry, I meant to ask if we could do your final inspection walk through? Again, sure, no problem. We tidied up, vacuumed and mopped, feeling pretty confident that we had passed the initial inspection so easily. This one shouldn’t be an issue.

We welcomed our social worker into our house. She seemed more interested in sitting and chatting than inspecting. Hmm. We sat on our couches and she pulled out a binder of paperwork. I began to think it was possible I misunderstood the purpose of this visit. I’d been wondering when our actual home study interviews would take place. We filled out a lot of answers to those types of questions in the initial paperwork, but surely there had to be more in person interviews. Turns out, we were in for a lot more than a walk through inspection on Thursday!

I have to say, I think this was the best way to approach the entire ordeal. I don’t know if they did it purposefully or if it was just miscommunication. It worked for us. Both of us would’ve been far more nervous had we known we were sitting down for 2 ½ hours of personal questions. As it turned out, we had a really pleasant talk with the social worker. She seemed kind and non-judgmental. Neither Missus Turtle nor I are particularly outgoing with new people, but we found it easy to talk to her and were comfortable enough to share honestly about our past, our personal feelings, our relationship and our feelings on foster parenting.

When we finished the questions, she asked if we wanted to keep going and start the training. Sure! We all have busy schedules and it was kind of a miracle that we all ended up free for 4 hours at the same time, so we thought we should go ahead and push on. We went over the policies and procedures for our agency and our state, as well as federal regulations. We talked about emergency procedures, documentation, basic rules, visits with biological parents and how the court system works. It was a fantastic way to begin training, as we were in the comfort of our home, it was just the three of us, Missus Turtle, our social worker who I’m going to start calling SW, and me. We felt comfortable interrupting and asking questions, and the training went at whatever pace worked for us. I feel that we got so much more out of it in such a short time than we ever would have if we’d done a group training session at the agency.

We were left with a big congratulations and a binder of at home training sessions we could do on our own time, complete with quizzes at the end of each section. SW told us she would finalize our paperwork on Thursday afternoon so it would be ready to send off on Friday morning.

Our certificate of approval finally arrived in the mail!

Missus Turtle and I looked at each other after she left with goofy grins on our faces. It had caught us by surprise, but I think we were both so happy with how the entire day had gone that we didn’t even mind. I felt a rush of emotions. Excitement, for sure. The long process that seemed almost insurmountable at first was drawing to a close, which in turn began an entirely new journey that should prove to be the biggest adventure of our lives.

I should admit I also felt immense apprehension. Reality hit, and I realized that this is really happening. We’re doing this. Will we be any good at foster parenting? Have we just ruined our lives? No one can argue that it’s not a good thing to do, but are we crazy? Finally, I felt a twinge of sadness. This is going to be harder than I can even imagine. The one thing I left out of this story, the topic of my next post, is that on the same day we finished our licensing requirements we also turned down our first placement. I’m still working through this one. I am still thinking about the placement, what it would’ve meant for us, what our lives and family might have looked like.