Thursday, September 22, 2016

Our foster care/adoption update.

Hello! We thought we would give an update on our foster care/adoption journey, since we have received such encouragement when we shared the news and we appreciate our community!

Since starting our PS-MAPP class (the 10 week intensive training course you have to take to become licensed foster/adoptive parents in the state of Iowa), we not only found out we were pregnant, but also that we're having twins! That has definitely changed our thoughts on what foster care/adoption will look like for us in the near future.

We still have big hearts for this and feel like God has called us down this path, but for now, we are basically putting it on hold. We still finished the class and are waiting for the license now, and definitely still want to get licensed and maintain our license. (You have to take 6 credit hours per year to maintain your license, but you get to pick which trainings you want to attend and when. Otherwise, if you let it expire, you have to redo all the classes and paperwork again to get it back. There are lots to choose from, and many are about behavior management, which actually sounds interesting to me!)

For the near future- we've decided until the twins turn one, or at least generally in that timeline- we are only doing respite care. We don't want to be completely on hold (being on hold means that you still have your license but you aren't doing anything to participate and won't receive calls for placements), and we would love to do respite care for awhile, especially because we have several friends in our town who are doing foster care as well. It would be a blessing to be able to help them out and give them breaks, because foster care is an intense commitment. We feel that is a way that we can still serve, while also not having as big of a commitment. We feel that it wouldn't be fair for our family or for a foster child to take long term placements right now, as we don't know how the rest of the twin pregnancy will go, and we know it will be a big transition when they arrive.

In case you don't know, respite care is basically just providing help to current foster families who have active placements, like if they have a family emergency, are going on vacation, or just need a little break. There are times where, for different reasons, a child may not be able to travel out of state or a certain distance away, or the birth parents may deny the approval of a trip, so the foster child has to stay behind if the family leaves. This would be a situation where respite care would be very helpful for a family.

In the future, once the twins are a little older and we feel like we've got the basic swing of things down with three kids, we hope to pick back up. We are currently not actively seeking out adoption, but hope to do that later in life, and want to be licensed for adoption in case a foster child would ever become available for adoption that is in our care and we feel led to adopt them.

So, there's where our hearts are at right now. Thank you very much to those who have prayed for us and encouraged us on this journey. It means a lot!

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