Our Family’s Path to Adoption: Part 2

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways, acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.” Proverbs 3 :5-6

I’ve always enjoyed walking through wooded trails and along interesting paths with twists and turns. The anticipation of “what’s around the corner” is so exciting! As we walked our path to adoption, there were so many unexpected changes along the way, which isn’t always as fu\n as a wooded path, but watching God’s perfect plan unfold was an amazing experience and more than made up for the rough spots.

I’m continuing today with our adoption story which much like the pictured path above, took many turns along the way. If you missed Part 1, you can go back and read it here. In Part 1 I shared a little about our children, the spacing of each, why we eventually began considering adoption, and why our first look into adopting a baby took a turn in another direction. What I didn’t tell you was where that turn led us next.

Around that time, we’d started a new Bible study group with some other homeschool families. It just so happened that one family had adopted their daughter, another family was a foster family, and a couple of others were starting classes to become foster parents. None of us came together thinking this would be our common link! We were coming together as homeschool families, not for the purpose of fostering and adopting. But God put us together for more reasons than one.

As we got to know these families, spent time in their homes each week, and could see what foster care looked like up close and personal in their everyday lives, my husband and I both felt God opening our hearts towards foster care. We prayed and prayed and prayed some more and decided to sign up for foster care classes. We thought, ‘Ok, this is where God was leading us all along. He gave us a heart to look into adoption, so we’d be warmed up for considering foster care.’

We went through a few months of training with our Christian foster/adoption agency. Some weeks we left class feeling very confident about moving forward. Other weeks were tougher with heartbreaking scenarios that we knew would be challenging possible situations to bring into our home, especially considering we already had two children in our home who we wanted to protect. One evening while walking out into the parking lot, I told my husband I was a little overwhelmed by the material we’d covered that night and asked him if he was worried about what could happen. Because he’s my rock and always a stabilizing factor, he reassured me that we’d hear different scenarios each week, some harder than others, and we needed to keep an objective outlook from week to week. By the end of our training, we had a decision to make, and we prayerfully decided to officially become foster parents. (I cannot say enough about the good training we received. More on our training in a future post!)

This was an exciting time! We worked to complete our home study, fingerprints, background checks, physicals, and paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. Our girls were very much on board and excited. They’d had separate bedrooms but asked to start sharing a room so we could prepare the extra one for foster children and they prayed all the time for God to send us a little one to love. And then we waited for approval. One day during the wait, one of our daughters who was so anxious to hear something went to the mailbox to find a letter from DHR (Department of Human Resources). She got so excited thinking it might be our approval letter, she started running up the driveway, waiving the letter, squealing, “We got a letter from DHR!” It was so cute! And I’m sure the neighbors were wondering what was going on with us that DHR had to get involved, lol. Well, it wasn’t the letter she’d hoped it would be, but we did eventually get approved.

A few months after we were licensed, we got our first placement of twin babies! Following that placement, my husband’s work travel was absolutely crazy. He was gone most weeks and sometimes traveled across two or three different states each week which complicated our fostering situation. So, we decided that we would switch to respite care just for the time being during this busy travel season and resume long-term placements when his travel slowed down again. For those of you who might not be familiar, respite care is taking in foster children who already have a foster family but need a place to stay for a shorter period of time like a weekend or maybe a week. If their foster family has to be out of town and can’t take them along then they have to stay with another licensed foster family. This worked for our family during this season because it was not long-term placement, so we told our social worked to call us anytime they needed respite care and if we were in town, we’d be happy to keep the child(ren).

In that following year, we hosted many children for respite care. We would always comment that maybe God was letting us have just a few days with them so we could always know to pray for them. And we still remember all the little ones we kept and talk about them and wonder where they are and how they’re doing. Each child was so special! One called Joel “Doel”, and we just can’t forget that. So sweet.

Also, it just so happened that by then we had a lot of friends by who were foster parents and because we were licensed, we could keep their foster children for them when they needed respite. This was very ideal for the children because since we were already friends with their foster families, they knew us and were familiar with our home, so it wasn’t so hard on them to stay with us. So, then we thought, ‘Ohhhh, this what God was leading us to! He doesn’t need us to be the foster parents. He just wants us to provide respite care so we can help out our friends in their fostering journeys!’

Well, that was partly right. But there was more and another big twist which I’ll share next time!