Hey, y'all! Happy Friday! Friday's around here mean one thing, it's time for Foster Friday! Our littles have been back home with their parents for a week now. We both miss them terribly. I don't think I've mentioned anything here on the blog, but we've bought a new house. As we're packing up we keep running across some of their things and we're both taken back by them. It's crazy that a ball or a rattle can have so many memories and feelings attached to them.
Our fostering experience wasn't a great one, by any means. We had a terrible caseworker (CW) who rushed along the case and pushed extremely hard to reunify the kids in a 4-month time-frame, despite hesitations from the magistrate, the Guardian Ad Litem and of course, us. We were
constantly going toe-to-toe with her and quite frankly, it was exhausting. At the end of all of this, we both seriously questioned whether or not we wanted to continue fostering.
I mentioned on the podcast that I had a slight breakdown at the beginning of the kids stay with us. Transitioning from 0 kids to 2 under 3 was extremely difficult for me. Luckily that anxiety went away and we honestly and truly had a great experience with the kids themselves. They were so incredibly easy! Everyone that met them commented that we got lucky with our first placement. We love Baby Girl and Little Boy and miss them tremendously.
We've spent a lot of time trying to decide if we want to do this again. Will I have another breakdown? Will the kids be as amazing as our last set? Would we be able to get along with the bio-parents as well as we did with this pair? Could we handle another crappy CW?
We put in a call to our licensing counselor (LC) who has been a little bulldog for us. We filled her in on our situation, including the most recent round of arguments where our CW told us our opinion "doesn't matter". Our concerns were forwarded on to the head of the organization. Whether anything is done about the caseworker's atrocious behavior or not is another story. I guess only time will tell.
While on the phone with our LC we mentioned that we told the CW that she had lost one foster family in this case (our littles had an older sister that was placed elsewhere) and that we told her she was losing a second one. Our LC talked us down and kept saying how she would hate to lose such "great foster parents" because of one person.
We decided we would put our house on hold until February. This would give our hearts a chance to mend and would allow us to get through the craziness of moving and the holidays. We're going on a cruise at the beginning of January and if we accepted a placement before then, the kid(s) would have to be re-homed for the week we are gone. We definitely don't want to have to do that to a little one, so we decided it would be best if we just hold off until after the cruise has passed.
The February timeframe will allow us to get our house in order and have the house licensed to house foster children. We'll have to have inspectors come out and check out the new digs to make sure we're in compliance with DCF before we receive our next placement.