Well folks, 2012 is off to a great start! Yesterday evening Andy and I accepted a counter offer on a home and if all goes well, we'll be moving into our first house at the end of February. As plans materialize, I'll blog more specifically about them. Instead, I wanted to focus this blog on the amazing night we had last night during...
Foster Care Orientation. For years, Andy and I have talked about adopting and eventually came to the conclusion that we wanted to adopt through the foster care system. We originally thought we would not foster children, but adopt through the system. However, as we began talking more about foster care, we realized our hearts were really being pulled toward fostering, as well. We couldn't deny how strongly we felt about providing safe, loving homes for children, no matter if we had them for a few weeks or months or if we were eventually blessed to adopt them. Through some friends in Iowa we've seen what a positive impact fostering can have on children and we hope to have the opportunity to show these children that we love them and have been praying for them since before we ever met.
In IN, you have to go through ten hours of training to become a licensed foster parent and the orientation served as our first three of ten hours. I was happy to be surrounded by people in the room with a variety of experience with the foster care system. It was comforting to have other people asking the same questions I was thinking, as well as families sharing their experiences with foster children. Overall, the night was incredibly overwhelming, but Andy and I both walked out with the same objective - God has directed our hearts toward this - let's do it.
For now, our preference is to foster infants to 5 year olds. As we get older, my prayer is to adopt teenagers from the foster care system. By far, the teenage population is the least likely to be adopted and my heart truly aches for these children. Though the situation is complex, if they have a desire to be adopted before "aging out" of the system at 18, I want the Crowes Nest to be a loving family and home for them.
As for resources, when we first starting talking about adopting through the foster care system, I started here:
http://www.adoptuskids.org/
For IN folks in particular, the IN gov website has a lot of great information:
http://www.in.gov/dcs/2341.htm
Our next step is to look through the huge folder of information we were provided yesterday and complete our foster care application, which includes fun things like getting finger printed! As things move along, I'm sure we'll be blogging about it! In the meantime, would you keep us and the children God has for us in your thoughts and prayers?
