Recommended Foster Care Reading List

I don't think I've put this here yet, and I keep forgetting to put it in a central place, so here we go.

This is the recommended reading list from experienced foster parents at Foster Care Central.

• A Guide to Foster Parenting: Everything but the Kids! By Mary Ann Goodearle
• The Five Love Languages of Children, By Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell
• Bad Childhood---Good Life: How to Blossom and Thrive in Spite of an Unhappy Childhood, By Dr. Laura Schlessinger
• Parenting Your Out-of-control Child: An Effective, Easy-to-use Program for Teaching Self-control, by George M. Kapalka
• 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child: The Breakthrough Program for Overcoming Your Child's Difficult Behavior, by Ph.D. Jeffrey Bernstein Ph.D.
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk (How to Help Your Child), by Adele Faber , Elaine Mazlish
• Fostering a Child's Recovery, by Mike Thomas, Terry Philpot, and Mary Walsh
• Robbie Rabbit's Trail through Foster Care (and the Trail through Adoption) www.robbietherabbit.com [for kids] 
• Mulberry Bird (if going through adoption only), by Anne Braff Brodzinsky and Diana L. Stanley [for kids]
• Forever Fingerprints, Maybe Days, by Jennifer Wilgocki (highly recommend) [for kids]
• Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control by Heather Forbes
• Adopting the Hurt Child, by Gregory Keck
• Parenting the Hurt Child, by Gregory Keck 
• Telling the Truth to your Adopted or Foster Child: Making Sense of the Past by Betsy Keefer & Jayne Schooler 
• Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew, by Sherrie Eldridge 
• Another Place at the Table, by Kathy Harrison
• Three Little Words, by Ashley Rhodes-Courter
• The Connected Child, by Karyn Purvis, David Cross, and Wendy Sunshine
• Nancy Thomas CDs (audio)
• Amazon.com Foster Parent Reading List

CI Interview II Report

Yesterday the CI called and said she had a cancellation for this morning, so we took it! Speed is always a good thing. She arrived at 8:30 and left a little after 10:00, and the questions weren't as intense as they were on Wednesday. Topics covered today:

• Child checklist: what behaviors/history/disabilities are we willing/not willing to accept/consider in a child/birth family. While this sounds difficult (and it is) because everything on the list could happen to anyone, the choices need to be made as to what needs, if any, we're simply not physically able or prepared to meet. Not being prepared to deal with basic needs while a child is recovering from trauma is something they'd like to avoid in general. That said, almost everything on the list (as far as behaviors) are developmentally appropriate for the age range we're looking at, so this part wasn't really that complicated.
• Level of comfort/concerns/personal perspectives on continuing birth family/important other people contact
• Finances and Will/future plans for child
• How would you respond if... child/family/public did/said...
• How will you address the concept of adoption/questions/birth family search (when older) with the child
• How will you handle child/adult offering information on trauma/details 
• Importance of our faith/plans for child
• Plans for discipline/views of child development
• Plans for daily child care/babysitters/respite providers 

Then we showed her around the house (Katharine, she approved of the bathrooms! Thank you!) and she made lots of notes, and that was that!

So now we wait again. But it sounds like we won't wait very long, at least not with her part. She will write up what she has to write up and submit it to our social worker at the beginning of next week, and call us to let us know she submitted it. Then our social worker will make any corrections and send it back to her, she'll make the changes, resubmit, and call us again. She estimates that process will be done before we travel for the holiday. Then, over our trip, they'll (theoretically) get the paperwork to the county foster office and we'll go from there.

I really have no idea if we'll have a placement right away, but there's potential. We have not yet been assigned a foster care social worker, so we'll have to get connected there and find out what we need to complete the clearance. But if they're as motivated as the CI, we could... maybe... have a child for Christmas. I'm starting to get excited again, but still feeling like I probably shouldn't quite yet.

The CI also asked if we were being foster cleared for multiple counties, which is something that hadn't come up as a possibility. There's apparently a much higher need for foster care in Charleston County, which is not our county, so if we can get multiple clearances, it may help things move more quickly as well. We'll follow up on that when we hear from our social worker.

Again, and always, thank you for your ongoing prayers!

CI Interview I report

I am exhausted.  They say that people's favorite subject to talk about is themselves, but three hours of it in a row with a lot riding on it really takes it out of you. Our CI was very sociable, making it more like a strongly guided conversation and less like an interrogation. She spent some time talking to both of us together, then half an hour or so with Lanse and then with me, and then both together again. Prior to today, people had asked what kind of things she needed to know, so here's some things we talked about:

• Adoption: why/how so far/reception of family & friends/concerns/hopes
• Parents/brothers/sisters/additional family and their past/work/hobbies and our relationship with them as a child/currently and amount of time we talk to/see them
• Our childhood: hardships/hobbies/ personality/discipline/chores/jobs
• Our formative years/events/hardships/ losses and our methods of coping/healing
• Our marriage/communication/routines/ decisionmaking/changes expected by a child's arrival
• Our/family's health: physical/mental/ emotional and how/why/treatment and how it affects us

So just a few little things. She will be back either Monday or Tuesday and we'll finish out with a bunch of other things, including the child checklist, other specifics on the children we're prepared to parent, finances, and the house itself. Of course, after all our housework, she didn't look at it today... but hopefully we'll be able to keep it mostly clean through the weekend.

And now that I've unwound a bit, it's time for some lunch!  Thank you all for your ongoing prayers!

CI Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning at 8:30 the CI will be here to begin our interview process. She should be here for two or three hours, and we'll talk about everything, apparently. We were told that she's really good and "very thorough". Thank the Lord that I woke up yesterday with scads of energy, something that almost never happens! I was able to clean the main areas of the house, put away all the filing, balance the budget, read four chapters of homework, and cook a steak dinner. Amazing!

Today, however, there's not so much energy. The medication I'm on at the moment is making me twitchy and feeling at loose ends, but I'm exhausted and don't really want to move. Even so, this morning I cleared up the kid's room and put bedding out, so that room is lovely, found another stack of books and had to rearrange the shelves to make them fit (a task I actually enjoy, so long as I don't get sucked into reading things), and aside from a small list of incidentals, I only have the upstairs loft left to straighten. Most of that is done already, and I just need to finish filling up the BORC (Box Of Random Stuff) and shove it in the attic. I also have to clean my bathroom floor, which is tiny, so that's okay. Doesn't sound like much compared to yesterday, but it's been a lot harder to get going today.

I appear to have wandered a bit. I find it interesting, though, how our attitudes have changed each time we've done the homestudy. The first time through, we didn't make it to the home visit, so we didn't have to clean like this. The second time, we were tweaked out about every little detail, and friends from church volunteered to come over and help me deep scrub. We emptied and cleaned out all the cabinets and sanitized the entire house top to bottom. This time we're much more relaxed, and balanced on that edge of wanting it to be company-ready, but also accurately represent our style of living, which is not company-ready. I seem to be the only one actually stressing out about it, (though Lanse is under a lot of stress at work, so it's hard to tell) but I'm definitely not sweating what I think of as the small stuff. Of course, my definition of "the small stuff" is different from other people's. But I figure if we ever have to do a homestudy again, we'll probably just vaccuum and make the beds.

Pray for us tomorrow morning. I'll let you know how it goes!

Self-induced DSS meeting

We passed the fire inspection easily, he just checked the smoke detectors and that was about it. He'd already measured windows and suchlike last year, and he treated it mostly as an update, but since we haven't any children placed yet there were some things that he didn't have to deal with (like checking records of fire drills and escape routes and such). I did have to redo our floor plan drawing just a little bit because in my haste I put the screen porch on in the wrong place, blocking a window that they could feasibly need to access in an emergency. So that's done.

All of the reference letters have been received. THANK YOU to all of our lovely friends who helped refer us! I don't know if those will be updated every year or not; obviously I hope for the fewest items to update, but if they do, I'm sure you'll hear from us.

The title of this post occurred this morning. When we were going through this process with Bethany, they explained to us that the autobiography interviews and the home visits were the ways in which our social worker gets to know us better as individuals, and we build that trust relationship. I know that I became much more comfortable working with them because of these steps. In the current system, however, we did not have to redo our autobiographies from the Bethany homestudy, and SC employs Certified Investigators (CI) - social workers whose only job is to travel around and do home visits and create the text of the homestudy from them. This person is not our personal social worker. So, I wondered, when do we get to know our own worker? I wrote and asked her how the process allowed for that opportunity, and she said, "How's Thursday morning at 10:00?"

So this morning we went to meet with her for the sole purpose of chatting about anything and becoming more comfortable with each other. I was really worried because when it came down to it, I didn't have any specific questions and didn't know what I'd say. I was also worried that by straying from "the way it officially works" we'd be labeled some of "THOSE" people, or that it would have negative repercussions somehow.

It ended up being a very nice hour. We mostly went over the process again, trying to identify those things which vary from the private agency approach, clarifying the differences between the adoption regional office and the foster county office and who does what, we shared photos of our niece and goddaughters, and chatted a little bit off topic about work, school, pets and life in general. It was a very good conversation, and accomplished what I had hoped: that we're now hopefully more comfortable working together.

Next Wednesday our CI comes to do the first of two home visits. Our lovely friend Katharine is coming tomorrow to help me do some deep cleaning that hasn't been done in a while, and hopefully everything will still be in order by Wednesday. After that visit we'll have a break for turkey day and then have the second visit (I assume that it won't be quick enough to finish before we travel, but you never know), and she'll wrap up the homestudy. Then it all goes over to the county foster office and we'll be licensed. Because we're hoping for very young children, there could be a bit of a wait... or we could have a temporary placement by Christmas. More uncertainty, but at least things are moving.

Thanks for your continued prayers!